--- title: Free Sitemap Checker description: Find and validate a site's XML sitemap — total URL count plus a sample crawl for broken (4xx/5xx) links. canonical: https://watchfor.io/sitemap-checker --- [Back to all free tools](/free-tools) # Sitemap Checker Find and validate a site's XML sitemap — total URL count plus a sample crawl for broken (4xx/5xx) links. Result No result yet Enter the inputs above and press Run. Results appear here in a moment. Monitor this 24/7 — get alerts on the first failure. [Start free](/auth/sign-up) Only run these tools against systems you own or are authorized to test. Using them to scan or probe systems without permission violates our [Terms](/legal/terms). ## What is Sitemap Checker ? An XML sitemap is the list you hand to search engines: "here is every URL on my site worth crawling, and when each last changed." Get it right and Google discovers new pages in hours. Get it wrong — missing file, stale URLs, links that 404 — and you quietly lose crawl coverage, with no error anywhere except a slow decline in indexed pages weeks later. This tool fetches a domain's sitemap (it looks for /sitemap.xml and follows a sitemap index to its child sitemaps), counts the URLs it declares, and then samples a few of them to check whether they actually load — so you catch the dead links a crawler would hit before the crawler does. ## How it works Each check runs the same path a search-engine crawler takes: - 1 Locate the sitemap — Normalise the target to https:// and fetch /sitemap.xml . If the response is a (a sitemap of sitemaps), follow it to the child sitemaps rather than stopping at the index. - 2 Parse and count — Read the and tally every entry — the total number of URLs the site is asking search engines to crawl. - 3 Sample for broken links — Request a handful of the listed URLs and record any that return 4xx or 5xx . A full site might list tens of thousands of URLs; the sample is a fast health signal, not an exhaustive crawl. The result tells you three things at a glance: does a sitemap exist, how many URLs it claims, and whether the sampled URLs are alive. A sitemap that lists 8,000 URLs but whose sample is full of 404s is worse than no sitemap at all — it's actively telling Google to waste crawl budget on dead pages. ## When you'd use it ### Post-launch / post-migration You just relaunched on a new platform. Confirm the sitemap exists at the expected path, lists the new URLs (not the old CMS's ?id= URLs), and that the sampled pages return 200 — before you submit it in Search Console and wonder why nothing indexes. ### SEO health audit Indexed-page count is drifting down. Check whether the sitemap still resolves, whether the URL count matches roughly what you expect, and whether sampled links are alive. A broken or shrinking sitemap is a frequent, invisible cause. ### Catch the broken links crawlers see Internal link checkers crawl from your homepage; search engines crawl from your sitemap. The two sets diverge. Sampling sitemap URLs surfaces dead pages that on-site crawlers miss because nothing links to them anymore. ### Verify a sitemap index Big sites split into a sitemap index pointing at many child sitemaps. Confirm the index is valid XML and that the children are reachable — a typo'd child URL silently drops a whole section of the site from discovery. ### Pre-flight before submitting to Search Console Google rejects sitemaps for subtle reasons (wrong content type, unescaped ampersands, URLs on a different host). A quick check that it parses and the URLs respond saves a frustrating round-trip through the Search Console error log. ## Reading the result ### Sitemap found (yes / no) Yes means a valid or was located and parsed. No means nothing parseable was at /sitemap.xml — the file may live elsewhere (declared only in robots.txt ), be returned with the wrong content type, or simply not exist. ### URL count How many entries the sitemap declares. Compare it to the number of pages you think you have: far too few means pages are missing from discovery; far too many can mean stale or thin URLs are being advertised. ### Sampled & broken How many URLs we test-fetched and how many of those failed ( 4xx / 5xx ). Any broken count above zero is worth investigating — the listed URLs are the ones you're explicitly asking Google to crawl, so dead ones waste crawl budget and signal a low-quality sitemap. ### Broken links list When the detailed view is available, each failing URL is shown with its status code so you can fix or remove it from the sitemap directly. ## Common pitfalls ### The sitemap isn't at /sitemap.xml Search engines also accept a Sitemap: directive in robots.txt pointing anywhere. If this tool reports not found but Google indexes you fine, your sitemap is probably declared in robots.txt at a non-standard path — check there. ### Sitemap index vs. urlset A contains no page URLs itself — only links to other sitemaps. If your top-level file is an index, the page URLs live one level down in the child sitemaps it references. ### The sample is not a full crawl We test a small sample of the listed URLs for speed. A clean sample doesn't guarantee every URL is alive — it's a fast confidence signal, not a guarantee. For an exhaustive crawl, use a dedicated crawler. ### Stale sitemaps outlive the pages Sitemaps are often generated once and forgotten. The most common failure isn't a missing file — it's a present file full of URLs for pages that were deleted or restructured months ago. ### Size limits A single sitemap is capped at 50,000 URLs / 50 MB uncompressed. Past that you must split into multiple sitemaps behind an index — a single giant sitemap will be partially ignored. ## Run Sitemap Checker on every change, not just once. Get alerts the moment something breaks — across HTTP, DNS, SSL, RDAP, ping, blacklist and more. Free forever for 10 monitors. No card. [Start free](/auth/sign-up) ## Frequently asked questions Where does it look for the sitemap? It normalises the domain to https:// and fetches /sitemap.xml . If that returns a sitemap index (a list of other sitemaps), it follows the index to the child sitemaps. If your sitemap lives at a non-standard path declared only in robots.txt , point the tool at that URL directly. Does it crawl every URL in the sitemap? No — it counts every declared URL but only test-fetches a small sample to check for broken (4xx/5xx) links. That keeps the check fast even for sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs. Use a dedicated crawler when you need every URL verified. Does it support sitemap index files? Yes. If the top-level file is a , it's recognised as an index rather than counted as zero URLs, and the child sitemaps it references are followed. What counts as a broken URL? Any sampled URL that returns a 4xx (e.g. 404 Not Found, 403 Forbidden) or 5xx (server error) status. Redirects ( 3xx ) to a working page are not counted as broken, though a sitemap full of redirects is a separate hygiene issue worth cleaning up. Why does it say no sitemap when I have one? Usually one of: the file isn't at /sitemap.xml (it's declared in robots.txt elsewhere), it's served with the wrong content type, it's gzipped in a way the fetch didn't unwrap, or it's behind authentication. Verify the URL loads as XML in a browser first. How many URLs can a sitemap contain? 50,000 per file, 50 MB uncompressed. Larger sites use a sitemap index that points to multiple child sitemaps, each under those limits. ## Related web tools - [MCP Server CheckerTest a Model Context Protocol server: initialize handshake, protocol version, capabilities and the full tool inventory.](/mcp-server-checker) - [SSL Certificate CheckInspect certificate validity, expiry, SANs, issuer and chain trust.](/ssl-checker) - [SSL/TLS GradeGrade a server's TLS config A+ to F — protocols, ciphers, forward secrecy, post-quantum, HSTS and certificate, with the exact reasons.](/ssl-grade-checker) - [HTTP HeadersInspect response headers, status, redirect chain and security headers.](/http-header-checker) --- Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/sitemap-checker · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt