XML Sitemap Validator

An XML sitemap is a file that tells search engines — Google, Bing, etc. — which pages exist on your site and which ones are most important. It is not required for your pages to appear in Google, but it is very helpful when the site is large, has pages with few internal links, or content is updated frequently. The standard is defined by sitemaps.org and Google has supported it since 2005.

urlset is the regular sitemap: it contains a list of URLs on your site (maximum 50,000 per file and 50 MB uncompressed). sitemapindex is a file that points to other sitemaps — useful when you have more than 50,000 URLs or want to organize your sitemap into sections (posts, products, categories). Google reads the sitemapindex first and then downloads each referenced sitemap independently.

• lastmod — the date of the page's last modification (YYYY-MM-DD format). This is the most useful field: Google uses it as a signal to decide when to re-crawl that URL. If it is inaccurate, it loses its value.
• changefreq — how often the page changes: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never. Google treats it as a hint, not an instruction.
• priority — the relative importance of the URL within your site, between 0.0 and 1.0 (default 0.5). It only makes sense within your own site; Google does not compare it across different sites.

Google may reject or ignore a sitemap with XML format errors, incorrect namespaces or malformed URLs. This does not mean your pages disappear from the index — Google can find them through other means — but the sitemap stops fulfilling its main purpose: guiding the crawler to the content that matters to you. Issues like duplicate URLs or out-of-range priority values (e.g. 1.5) also generate warnings in Google Search Console.

The most common locations are https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. WordPress with Yoast SEO places it at /sitemap_index.xml; Rank Math also uses /sitemap_index.xml. Shopify generates it automatically at /sitemap.xml. If you cannot find it, check your site's robots.txt file: the Sitemap: line indicates the exact URL.

Each sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs and weigh a maximum of 50 MB uncompressed (or 50 MB compressed as .gz). If your site exceeds that number, you must use a sitemapindex pointing to multiple sitemap files. You can have up to 500 sitemaps in an index. These figures apply per sitemap, not per site.