Sitemap Checker

Up to 5 sampled URLs per run, to keep checks fast and to avoid hammering your server. A clean sample is a good signal, but it is not a guarantee that every URL in a large sitemap works — treat it as an early-warning system.

A sitemap index is a sitemap of sitemaps — large sites split their URLs across child sitemaps and list them in one index file. The tool recognizes index files, counts the children, and samples URLs from them when it discovers the index from your site URL.

A sitemap is you telling crawlers “these pages are worth indexing.” When entries return 404s or errors, crawlers learn to trust your sitemap less, and crawl budget gets spent on dead ends instead of your real content.

No — they are optional, and the tool only reports their absence as information. If you do include them, they must use the W3C datetime format (like 2026-07-09) and be accurate; search engines ignore lastmod values they catch being wrong.

A sitemap helps discovery, but it does not force indexing. Pages still need to be crawlable (check robots.txt), indexable (no noindex), and worth indexing in the engine’s judgment. Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console to see per-URL indexing status.