Sitemap Checker

Why Your Sitemap Matters More Than You Think

Most site owners set up a sitemap once and never look at it again. That's a problem. A sitemap that returns a 404, redirects to the wrong URL, or quietly lists 80,000 pages when Google only reads 50,000... these are the kinds of issues that kill your indexing without any obvious warning sign.

This tool fetches your sitemap the same way Google does. It checks robots.txt first, then falls back to the standard paths. It tells you exactly what it found, what HTTP status each file returned, and how many URLs are inside. Once you know your sitemaps are clean, it's also worth checking your robots.txt because there are plenty of sites where the sitemap is fine but robots.txt is accidentally blocking Googlebot from half the pages.

How the Tool Finds Your Sitemaps

There's a specific order crawlers use when they look for sitemaps, and this tool follows it exactly:

1. robots.txt first. If you've declared a Sitemap: line in your robots.txt, that's what gets fetched first. This is the correct way to declare a sitemap.
2. Common fallback paths. If nothing is declared, it tries /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml. Most CMS platforms put sitemaps in one of these two locations.
3. Sitemap index expansion. If it finds a sitemap index, it follows all the child sitemaps inside it. Large sites often split into dozens of individual files organised under one index.
4. Status, format and count. Each file is checked for its HTTP status, whether it's XML, RSS or HTML, and how many URLs it contains.

What the Results Actually Mean

A lot of sitemap problems look fine on the surface until you check the status code.

• 200. Good. Google can read it. Nothing to fix here.
• 404. The file doesn't exist at that URL. If it's declared in robots.txt, Google is following a dead link every time it crawls your site. Fix this immediately.
• 301 or 302. The sitemap URL is redirecting. Google will usually follow it, but it's messy. Update the declared URL to skip the redirect entirely.
• 403. Access denied. Your server is blocking the request. Sometimes this is Cloudflare or a WAF blocking bots, sometimes it's a permissions issue on the file itself.
• URL count over 50,000. Google won't process more than 50,000 URLs from a single sitemap file. Split it up and use a sitemap index to organise the pieces.
• No sitemaps found at all. Not necessarily a disaster, but you're making Google's job harder. Most modern CMS platforms generate sitemaps automatically, so check if the feature is turned off somewhere.

A Few Things Worth Getting Right

• Declare your sitemap in robots.txt using a full absolute URL, not a relative path. Some crawlers don't handle relative sitemap declarations correctly.
• Don't pad your sitemap with noindex pages, redirect URLs or thin content. Google notices when a sitemap has hundreds of pages that aren't worth indexing and it affects how much the file is trusted.
• Keep lastmod accurate. If you update every URL to today's date as a trick to get recrawled faster, Google will eventually stop trusting your lastmod values entirely.
• Submit directly in Google Search Console. It gives you visibility into how many URLs Google actually discovered versus how many it indexed, which is often a very different number.
• After a site migration or domain change, always resubmit your sitemap. Don't assume the old one still points to the right place.