Sitemap checker
Your sitemap is the fast lane search engines use to discover your pages — and a broken one fails silently: the URL answers, the file is XML, and nothing gets crawled from it. Enter your domain and we fetch /sitemap.xml and validate it: no file, HTML soft-404s, an empty urlset, invalid or future lastmod dates, non-absolute URLs.
The entries, the problems, the counts
Five findings, the same ones the £7.99 audit flags
This checker runs the sitemap portion of our real audit engine — the rules behind the sitemap findings in every report we sell. One fetch, the verdicts below.
1 · No sitemap.xml at all
Nothing answers at /sitemap.xml. Discovery of your pages is then left to links alone — new and deep pages can take weeks to be found, and some never are. Flagged as an error, with the two-line fix (publish the file, declare it in robots.txt).
2 · The URL serves HTML, not XML
A soft-404 or SPA fallback answering at /sitemap.xml returns a web page. Search engines find nothing to crawl from it — the file looks present in every CMS dashboard and does nothing. Flagged as an error.
3 · The urlset contains no URLs
A valid XML wrapper with zero <url><loc> entries: crawlers get nothing. Usually a broken generator or a staging export deployed to production. Flagged as an error.
4 · lastmod dates that are invalid or in the future
lastmod should be a W3C datetime of the last real content change. Unparseable dates get the entry's freshness signal ignored; future dates (clock skew, template placeholders) signal low-quality generation and get discounted. Flagged as warnings with the offending entry highlighted.
5 · Non-absolute sitemap URLs
Every <loc> must be a fully-qualified http(s) URL on your own host. Relative paths are invalid and dropped silently. Flagged as a warning.
What a healthy sitemap entry looks like
Each entry is a URL you vouch for, plus — optionally — the date its content last genuinely changed. That is the whole format.
- Lines 4 and 8 are absolute https URLs. Full protocol and host — relative paths are invalid and dropped.
- Lines 5 and 9 are real dates. W3C datetime, the day the content actually changed — not the build date, not next Tuesday.
- Every URL you list, you vouch for. Noindex pages, redirects and 404s in the sitemap all waste crawl budget and credibility.
- Big site? Over 50,000 URLs, split into child sitemaps behind an index — the checker detects and counts that shape.
Your sitemap is 2 of 260+ checks
The checker above is free and instant. The full £7.99 audit runs all of it: 260+ checks across 21 categories on up to 25 pages, an AI-written plain-English report, delivered by email in ~30 minutes. What it costs · read a real sample report.
The full audit
Everything on this page plus the other 250+ checks, in one ordered fix-list.
- Sitemap presence, validity and URL sanity — plus the robots.txt Sitemap: line
- Orphan pages: in the sitemap but unreachable by links (or the reverse)
- Crawlability: robots.txt directives, meta robots, X-Robots-Tag
- Internal linking depth and broken internal links, page by page
- Canonical tags and duplicate-URL consolidation
- Everything else: SEO basics, security, accessibility, performance, AI-readiness
— Not ours to claim
What no external tool can do:
- See inside Search Console — crawl stats and indexing requests live behind your Google login; the report names the exact screen to open
- Edit your site for you — the fix is yours to apply (or ours: we do fixes too); the report gives the exact lines
- Promise rankings or AI citations — nobody honestly can; what the report guarantees is that nothing on your site mechanically blocks the machines that read it
Also honest: this checker looks at one slice. A passing slice with failing pages elsewhere is exactly what the full crawl is for.
Fair questions, straight answers
What is a sitemap and do I still need one?
It is an XML file at your domain root listing the URLs you want search engines to know about. Internal links remain the primary discovery path, but a sitemap is the fast lane for new and updated pages — especially on sites where important pages sit deep or launch before any link points at them. The audit counts a missing sitemap as an error because discovery should not depend on luck.
What is lastmod and should I set it?
lastmod tells crawlers when a URL's content last significantly changed, so they can prioritise re-crawls. Set it only when the content genuinely changed — not on every deploy, and never a placeholder or future date. Engines learn to discount sites whose dates are noise, and the checker flags exactly that pattern.
How many URLs can a sitemap hold?
50,000 URLs or 50MB per file — after that you split URLs across child sitemaps behind a sitemap index (a
Does a sitemap fix pages not ranking?
No — a sitemap is a discovery aid, not a quality signal. Listing a URL tells engines it exists; it does not make it rank. If pages are indexed but ranking poorly, the levers are content, links and page experience — all of which the full audit examines. The sitemap matters for the pages that are not being found at all.
The fast lane is checked. 258 more checks are waiting.
Enter your URL and pay securely — your report PDF lands in your inbox in ~30 minutes,
with sitemap validity, orphan pages, robots directives and 250+ other checks run and explained.