XML Sitemap Checker: Find every error.

What our XML sitemap checker actually checks

A working sitemap isn’t just a valid XML file. Google reads sitemaps as a strong hint about which URLs you consider canonical, when each was last updated, and how the site is organised. A sitemap that’s syntactically valid but tells Google the wrong story is worse than no sitemap at all — it can pin the wrong page version, slow re-indexing of recently-changed content, and waste crawl budget on dead URLs.

Our checker validates the file as XML first (catches the obvious schema errors most CI tools also catch), then runs the parts that matter for SEO outcomes:

• URL pattern consistency — flags inconsistent trailing slashes, mixed http/https, mixed www/bare hosts, and stray query strings.
• Stale lastmod tags — pages where lastmod hasn’t changed in over a year, or where lastmod is set to today on every URL (a common bug that destroys signal value).
• Depth and orphan anomalies — pages buried deeper than the rest of your site, pages with zero internal links pointing in, and clusters that look isolated from your main hierarchy.
• Sitemap index handling — for multi-file sitemaps, we recursively pull every child sitemap and analyse the full URL set, not just the index.

Why a sitemap audit is worth doing every quarter

Most teams ship the sitemap once and forget it exists. Three quarters later, you’ve added a new content section, deprecated some pages, restructured the URL scheme, or pushed a CMS upgrade — and the sitemap still reflects the world as it was when you launched. Every URL in the sitemap that doesn’t belong there is a small drag on Googlebot’s ability to find your real pages, and every recently-changed page that the sitemap still marks “modified 2024-03-12” is a missed opportunity to get re-crawled and re-ranked sooner.

We don’t just give you a pass/fail score — we rank the issues by likely SEO impact and produce a fix list you can hand to a developer or run yourself. The free tier covers up to 500 URLs, which is enough for most sites. The paid tier adds monitoring, history, and AI- generated content recommendations based on the gaps we find.

Common sitemap mistakes we see weekly

After auditing thousands of sitemaps, the same issues come up again and again — most of them invisible to anything but a structured analysis. Read about each in our learn cluster: missing lastmod, changefreq misuse, trailing-slash inconsistency, and the very common case where a sitemap lists URLs that robots.txt blocks — a self-defeating pattern that costs nearly every audited site some crawl budget.