🗺️ Sitemap.xml Validator
Fetch sitemap.xml, parse syntax, and check URL count, lastmod / changefreq / priority, hreflang, image / video / news extensions, size, and 50k URL / 50 MB limits.
📖 What this check tells you
This check fetches your sitemap.xml for real, confirms it parses as XML, counts the URLs, reports how many carry lastmod / changefreq / priority, and lists the children of a sitemapindex. All green here still does not mean the listed URLs get indexed, because a sitemap is a discovery hint to Google rather than an instruction.
| Item | What it means | How to fix it |
|---|---|---|
| The 50,000 URL and 50 MB limits | One file may hold 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Going over does not truncate the extra entries — the whole file is rejected. Serving it gzipped does not help, since the limit applies to the uncompressed size. | Split with a sitemapindex. The index itself also holds up to 50,000 entries, which allows 2.5 billion URLs in theory. Split by update cadence — articles, products, static pages — rather than by directory, and maintaining lastmod later becomes much easier. |
| Every lastmod is the same date | Many CMSes stamp every URL with today whenever they regenerate the file. When that happens Google decides the value is untrustworthy and ignores lastmod for the whole site — the same goes for dates in the future. Its value as a freshness signal is simply gone. | Emit the time the content itself actually changed, as a W3C Datetime with a timezone (2026-07-26T10:00:00+09:00). As a rule, do not move lastmod for a page where only the header or footer changed. If you cannot decide, omitting lastmod does less damage than faking it. |
| URLs that do not belong | A sitemap should carry only the canonical URLs you want indexed. Mixing in noindex pages, pages whose canonical points elsewhere, URLs that redirect, or 404s wastes crawl budget and makes the exclusion report in Search Console much harder to read. | Filter at generation time on three conditions: returns 200, is not noindex, and its canonical points at itself. changefreq and priority are values Google has stated it does not use, so leaving them out costs nothing — dropping them to shrink the file is the more practical choice. |
Listing a URL in a sitemap does not lift its ranking. What it helps with is discovering new pages that have few internal links, and crawl efficiency on large sites. Add the line Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml to robots.txt and submit it in Search Console as well, so you can see which URLs were excluded and why.