---
title: "Free Sitemap Validator"
description: "Validate any XML sitemap instantly. Count URLs, follow nested sitemap indexes, and catch missing lastmod dates, relative URLs and duplicates."
url: "https://skribra.com/tools/sitemap-validator"
type: "tool"
---

# Free Sitemap Validator

Validate any XML sitemap instantly. Count URLs, follow nested sitemap indexes, and catch missing lastmod dates, relative URLs and duplicates.

Free, no sign-up. The tool itself runs on the HTML page — this representation carries everything around it.

## Make Sure Crawlers Can Read Your Sitemap

Your [sitemap](https://skribra.com/glossary/sitemap) is how you tell search engines what exists on your site. When it breaks — malformed XML, relative URLs, a nested sitemap returning a 404, more than 50,000 entries in one file — crawlers quietly skip what they cannot parse, and you have no idea pages are missing. This validator fetches your sitemap, parses it the way a crawler would, follows any nested sitemaps and reports exactly what it found.

Keeping a sitemap accurate by hand gets old fast. Skribra publishes on your behalf and keeps your sitemap and internal links current automatically, so new articles are discoverable the day they go live.

## Who Benefits From a Sitemap Validator?

Anyone who needs search engines to find every page they publish.

- **SEO Specialists** — Confirm every URL you want indexed is actually in the sitemap.
- **Web Developers** — Verify a generated sitemap is valid XML before it ships.
- **Content Teams** — Check that newly published articles made it into the sitemap.
- **Ecommerce Managers** — Audit large product sitemaps split across a sitemap index.
- **Site Migrators** — Compare URL counts before and after a migration to catch losses.
- **Agency Teams** — Validate client sitemaps without waiting on a full crawl.
- **Publishers** — Make sure lastmod dates are present so crawlers know what changed.
- **Technical Writers** — Confirm documentation pages are discoverable by search engines.

## FAQ

### What does the sitemap validator check?

That the URL returns a valid XML document with either a urlset or sitemapindex root, that it is served with an XML content type, and then per-URL issues: total count against the 50,000 limit, duplicate entries, relative URLs where absolute ones are required, URLs spanning multiple hostnames, and whether lastmod dates are present.

### Does it follow nested sitemaps?

Yes. If you give it a sitemap index it fetches the child sitemaps and counts their URLs individually, so you see which parts of your site are covered and which nested sitemaps are unreachable. It follows one level deep and checks the first five children, which covers the overwhelming majority of real sitemaps.

### Where do I find my sitemap URL?

Try yoursite.com/sitemap.xml first — that is the convention. If it is not there, check your robots.txt at yoursite.com/robots.txt, which usually declares the sitemap location on a Sitemap: line.

### Why does it say my URLs are missing lastmod dates?

The lastmod element tells crawlers when a page last changed, which helps them prioritize recrawling. It is optional, so a sitemap without it is still valid — but including accurate dates is one of the cheapest ways to get updated content noticed sooner.

### What is the 50,000 URL limit?

The sitemap protocol caps a single file at 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed. Past that, split your URLs across multiple sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index — every major search engine supports this and most CMS platforms do it automatically.

### Is a sitemap required for SEO?

Not strictly — search engines can find pages by following links. But a sitemap makes discovery faster and more reliable, especially for large sites, new sites with few backlinks, and pages that are not well linked internally.

## Related tools

- [Technical SEO Audit](https://skribra.com/tools/technical-seo-audit): Run 30 on-page SEO checks against any domain in about a second.
- [Robots.txt Generator](https://skribra.com/tools/robots-txt-generator): Create a valid robots.txt to control which pages crawlers can reach.
- [CMS Detector](https://skribra.com/tools/cms-detector): Find out which CMS, builder or framework any website is running on.
- [Schema Generator](https://skribra.com/tools/schema-generator): Generate valid JSON-LD structured data for rich search results.

## Machine-readable index

- HTML version of this page: https://skribra.com/tools/sitemap-validator
- Site index for agents: https://skribra.com/llms.txt
- Sitemap: https://skribra.com/sitemap.xml
- Public REST API: https://skribra.com/api/v1
- OpenAPI specification: https://skribra.com/openapi.json