Sitemap Checker

An XML sitemap is a file that lists URLs on a website along with optional metadata — last modification date (lastmod), change frequency (changefreq), and priority — to help search engines discover and crawl content more efficiently. It is not a guarantee of indexing; search engines use sitemaps as hints, not instructions. Sitemaps are especially valuable for large sites, new sites with few backlinks, and sites with dynamically generated content that may not be easily discovered through crawling alone.

Submit your sitemap URL in Google Search Console (Settings → Sitemaps) and Bing Webmaster Tools. You can also reference your sitemap in your robots.txt file with Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml — this makes it discoverable by any crawler that reads robots.txt, including crawlers that are not logged into a webmaster console. Large sites often use a sitemap index file that references multiple individual sitemaps to stay within the 50,000 URL / 50MB per sitemap limit.

Include all canonical, indexable URLs you want search engines to discover — pages that return 200 OK, are not blocked by robots.txt, do not have a noindex tag, and are not duplicates. Do not include: redirect URLs (301/302 targets), 404 pages, pages with noindex, canonicalised duplicate pages, admin/login pages, or URLs with session parameters. Including non-canonical or blocked URLs wastes crawl budget and can confuse search engines about which version of a page to index.

Update your sitemap whenever you add, remove, or significantly modify pages. Automated sitemap generation (via CMS plugins or build processes) is ideal for sites with frequently changing content. The lastmod attribute signals to crawlers when a URL was last changed, helping them prioritise re-crawling updated content. For static sites with infrequent changes, manual updates are sufficient. After updating, ping Google via Search Console or the Ping API to notify crawlers that the sitemap has changed.