Sitemap Checker

How this finds your sitemap

It looks where a crawler looks, in the same order. First the Sitemap: lines in robots.txt, since that is the declared location. Then the conventional paths — /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /wp-sitemap.xml and a few others.

If it finds nothing, that is the finding. A site with no discoverable sitemap relies entirely on internal links for discovery, which works for small sites and fails quietly for large ones, especially for pages that nothing links to yet.

What a sitemap does and does not do

A sitemap is a discovery aid. It tells crawlers which URLs exist and, via lastmod, which have changed. It does not force indexing, it does not improve rankings, and a URL in your sitemap can still be excluded for a dozen other reasons.

That said, the failure it prevents is real: pages that exist, are linked from nowhere obvious, and therefore never get crawled. New sites and deep archives are where this bites hardest.

The lastmod date is the most underused part. Crawlers use it to prioritise recrawls. A sitemap where every entry claims to have changed today is worse than no dates at all, because it gets ignored.

The protocol limits

A single sitemap holds at most 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed. Past either limit, crawlers process what fits and discard the rest — silently.

The fix is a sitemap index: one file listing other sitemaps, each within the limits. An index can itself reference up to 50,000 sitemaps, which is more headroom than any site needs. This tool follows your index and samples the children to confirm they are reachable.

• Absolute URLs only — relative paths are invalid in a sitemap and get skipped.
• Same domain — cross-domain entries are ignored unless you have verified cross-submission.
• Canonical versions — list the URL you want indexed, not a redirect or a parameterised variant.
• No duplicates — repeated entries waste crawl budget and muddy the lastmod signal.

Checker or validator — which do you need?

The two words get used interchangeably, but people searching for them usually want different things. A validator answers "is this XML well-formed and schema-legal?" A checker answers "does my sitemap actually work?" — which includes finding it in the first place, and catching problems that are perfectly legal XML.

This tool does both, in that order. It validates the format, then keeps going: a sitemap can parse cleanly and still list URLs on the wrong domain, repeat entries, use relative paths, or claim every page changed today. None of that breaks the XML. All of it wastes crawl budget.

If you only need strict schema validation against the sitemaps.org spec, any XML validator will do. If you want to know why your pages are not being discovered, the format is rarely the answer.

Sitemaps and AI crawlers

AI crawlers have the discovery problem worse than Google does. They crawl less of the web, revisit less often, and most of them do not execute JavaScript. A page they never fetch cannot be quoted in an answer, and unlike Google there is no Search Console to tell you it happened.

The Sitemap: line in robots.txt is read by more than Googlebot. OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot all fetch robots.txt before crawling, which makes a declared sitemap the cheapest way to hand them a complete URL list instead of hoping they follow enough internal links.

This matters most for the pages AI answers actually cite: documentation, guides and reference content that sits deep in a site and gets linked from one navigation menu. Those are exactly the URLs that go undiscovered when nothing declares them.

How to use it

1. Enter your domain — Just the domain — the tool finds the sitemap itself.
2. Check it was found — If nothing was found, the locations tried are listed so you can see what a crawler would have missed.
3. Review URL hygiene — Relative paths, cross-domain entries and duplicates are all flagged.
4. Declare it in robots.txt — Add a Sitemap: line so crawlers stop guessing.