SEO tools
Sitemap Validator: Find and Check a Site's XML Sitemap
Looks for the sitemap the way a crawler does — the robots.txt declaration first, then the conventional locations — then confirms it parses as XML and counts the URLs inside it.
What this sitemap validator tests
Discovery order matters. The robots.txt declaration is the only location a crawler is told about without guessing, so a sitemap that exists but is never declared is doing less work than it should.
- Whether a sitemap can be found at all, starting from the Sitemap: line in robots.txt.
- Whether the response is 200 and is served as XML rather than an HTML page.
- Whether the document parses, and whether it is a urlset or a sitemap index.
- How many URLs it declares, following an index to its children where necessary.
What a valid sitemap does not guarantee
Syntax validity and usefulness are different properties. A perfectly well-formed sitemap can still hurt you if a third of its URLs redirect, return 404, or carry a noindex directive — it then reads as a list of pages you could not describe accurately.
After this check passes, sample the URLs themselves: take twenty at random and confirm each returns 200, is canonical to itself, and is indexable.
Common sitemap failures
For the format itself, the required elements, and how to split a large file, see the XML sitemap guide .
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Not found | No robots.txt declaration and a non-standard path | Declare it in robots.txt |
| Returns HTML | A soft 404 or an SPA catch-all route | Serve real XML with an XML content type |
| Behind a redirect | A host or slash rule catching the file | Serve it directly at the declared URL |
| Parses but empty | An index whose children are never generated | Generate the child files |
- Does a sitemap make Google index my pages?
- No. A sitemap is a discovery hint. It helps Google find URLs, and has no influence on whether Google judges them worth indexing once found.
- Should the sitemap be at /sitemap.xml?
- It is the strong convention, and a root location matters technically too: a sitemap may only list URLs at or below its own directory.
Other tools
Fetches the robots.txt file for the host you enter, reports whether it exists and whether it blocks every crawler, and reads the page-level robots directives alongside it.
Reads the canonical URL a page declares, then fetches that URL to confirm it resolves, is not redirected, and is not noindexed — the three ways a canonical silently becomes inert.
Parses the structured data on the page you enter, lists the schema.org types it finds, and flags blocks that fail to parse or are missing the properties their type requires.
Follows the URL you enter through every hop, reporting the status code at each step and the final destination — the detail a browser hides once the address bar settles.
Fetches the page you enter, takes a sample of the internal links it points at, and requests each one — reporting the status code that comes back instead of the colour of the link.
Checks every signal that decides whether a page is allowed into the index — the status code, robots.txt access, meta robots, the X-Robots-Tag header, and the canonical.
Queries the live DNS for the domain you enter and reports the records it publishes: the addresses it resolves to, where its mail goes, and whether the TXT records email authentication depends on are present.
Queries the registry over RDAP — the structured successor to classic WHOIS — and reports when the domain was registered, how old it is now, who the registrar is, and when the registration lapses.
Enter a domain to find when it was registered, how old it is today, when it expires, and which registrar holds it. Domain age is context for a diagnosis, not a Google ranking factor.
Opens a TLS connection to the host you enter and reports the certificate it presents — the issuer, the validity window, the days remaining, and the negotiated protocol version.
Requests the URL you enter and reports what the server sends back in its headers — the security headers present, the caching policy, whether the response is compressed, and which HTTP version was negotiated.