04 / Forge / SEO / Server-side
Sitemap validator
Fetch a sitemap or index, check it is well-formed, count entries, and flag foreign hosts and bad dates. Fetches the target through the engine's validated fetcher: public http and https addresses only, size and time limits, rate-limited.
What this sitemap validator does
Enter a sitemap URL and the tool fetches it, identifies whether it is a URL set or a sitemap index, checks that the XML parses, counts the entries, and shows a sample. It flags URLs that point at a different host than the sitemap itself, which search engines ignore, and lastmod values that are not valid dates.
Why sitemaps go wrong
Generators often emit the staging hostname, keep deleted pages, or write lastmod as a build time so every page looks freshly changed. None of those break the file, but all of them waste crawl budget and teach search engines to distrust the dates. The tool surfaces the first two directly and gives you the sample to spot the third.
Questions
Where is my sitemap?
Most sites serve it at /sitemap.xml, and the robots.txt should point to it with a Sitemap line. The robots.txt validator on this site shows that line.
How many URLs can a sitemap hold?
Fifty thousand URLs or fifty megabytes uncompressed. Larger sites split into several files listed in a sitemap index.
Does the tool check every URL in the sitemap?
No. It validates the file and its entries; it does not fetch each page. Use Vector for a per-page examination.
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