Sitemap Checker
Enter a domain or sitemap URL to instantly check if a sitemap exists, how many URLs it contains, and whether it follows SEO best practices.
What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the important pages on your website and tells search engines like Google and Bing where to find them. It acts as a roadmap for crawlers — helping them discover and index your content faster and more accurately. Without a sitemap, search engines have to rely entirely on link-following to find your pages, which can miss new content or orphaned pages.
Why Does Your Sitemap Matter for SEO?
Faster Indexing
Google can discover and index new pages within hours rather than days when a sitemap is present and up to date.
Complete Coverage
Sitemaps ensure every important page is submitted to search engines — not just pages that happen to be linked from somewhere.
Crawl Prioritization
Adding <lastmod> and <priority> values signals to search engines which pages to re-crawl first after updates.
Large Site Scalability
Sitemap index files allow large sites to split thousands of URLs across multiple sitemaps, staying within Google's 50,000 URL limit per file.
What Makes a Good Sitemap?
Includes all important pages
Every canonical URL you want indexed should appear. Exclude paginated pages, session URLs, and duplicates.
Uses <lastmod> dates accurately
Set <lastmod> to the actual date the page content last changed — not the current date on every URL. Inaccurate dates train Google to ignore them.
Referenced in robots.txt
Add 'Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml' to your robots.txt so all search engines find it automatically.
Submitted to Google Search Console
Submit your sitemap URL directly in Search Console under Indexing → Sitemaps for faster processing and status monitoring.
Stays under 50,000 URLs per file
Google limits sitemap files to 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed. Use a sitemap index file to manage larger sites.
Only includes 200-status URLs
Never include redirects (3xx), client errors (4xx), or server errors (5xx) in your sitemap.
Sitemap vs Sitemap Index: What's the Difference?
Standard Sitemap
- • Contains
<urlset>with individual<url>entries - • Best for sites under 50,000 pages
- • Each URL can include loc, lastmod, changefreq, priority
- • Directly lists your pages
Sitemap Index
- • Contains
<sitemapindex>pointing to child sitemaps - • Best for large sites with 50,000+ pages
- • Allows splitting by section (blog, products, pages)
- • Google can process each sub-sitemap independently
Pro tip: Check your competitors' sitemaps
Pasting a competitor's domain into this tool reveals how many pages they have indexed, how frequently they publish, and what their URL structure looks like. It's one of the fastest ways to understand their content strategy.
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