Updated · Built and checked by the PlinzoTools team, formulas tested against published sources
Validate an XML sitemap against the sitemaps.org protocol: structure, URL count, and date formats.
This tool checks a sitemap XML file against the sitemaps.org protocol: a valid root element (<urlset> or <sitemapindex>), a <loc> tag on every entry with an absolute URL, valid ISO 8601 <lastmod> dates where present, and the 50,000-entry-per-file limit.
Paste your sitemap's XML content. Entry count and any protocol issues appear instantly.
The checks are deliberately simple and deterministic. The tool looks for a root element of either urlset or sitemapindex. It then extracts every url entry (or every sitemap entry, when the root is an index) and inspects each one. For every entry it confirms there is a loc element, that the loc value can be parsed as an absolute URL, and that any lastmod value matches an ISO 8601 pattern. Finally it compares the entry count against the 50,000-entry limit.
It uses pattern matching rather than a full XML parser. That works well for the flat, predictable structure of a normal sitemap, but it means the tool is not a substitute for checking that your file is well-formed XML in the strict sense. An unclosed tag elsewhere in the file, or a stray character before the XML declaration, may not be flagged here even though a strict parser would reject the file.
Imagine a small site with a sitemap containing three entries. The first has a loc of https://example.com/ and a lastmod of 2026-03-01. The second has a loc of /pricing (a relative path) and a lastmod of 2026-03-02. The third has a loc of https://example.com/blog and a lastmod written as March 5, 2026. The validator reports three entries found and two issues: one loc value is not an absolute URL, and one lastmod value is not a valid ISO 8601 date. Fixing them means changing the second loc to https://example.com/pricing and rewriting the third date as 2026-03-05.
The lastmod check accepts a plain date such as 2026-03-05, or a full timestamp such as 2026-03-05T14:30:00Z or 2026-03-05T14:30:00+05:00. A timestamp without a time zone designator, or with fractional seconds, will be flagged by this tool even though some generators emit them. If you see that warning on a file your CMS generated, check whether the format is one you can adjust in the generator settings.
It does not fetch any URL, so it cannot tell you whether the pages in your sitemap return a 200 status, redirect, or 404. It does not check that lastmod values are honest, that the pages are indexable, or that the file is small enough in bytes for a particular crawler. Whatever you paste stays in your browser. After the structure is clean, submit the sitemap through the search engine's own webmaster tools and review the coverage or indexing reports there, since those reflect what the crawler actually did.
A validation pass is most useful after changing a sitemap plugin, migrating a site, switching URL structures, or hand-editing a file. It is also a fast way to count entries when you want to know how close a large site is to the per-file limit before deciding to split it into an index.
Split them across multiple sitemap files and reference them all from a single sitemap index file (a <sitemapindex> root) -- this tool validates both formats.
<lastmod> required?No -- it's optional per the protocol, but when present it must be a valid date.
Most often the pasted text is missing url or sitemap wrapper elements, or the XML was pasted as an escaped or HTML-encoded string. Paste the raw XML source, not the rendered page from a browser view that stripped tags.
No. Passing means the structure follows the protocol. Whether pages get crawled and indexed depends on content quality, crawlability, and many other factors outside this check.
Paste one file at a time. Validate the index first, then paste each child sitemap it references in turn.
No. Those tags are optional and this tool only checks loc, lastmod, the root element, and the entry count.
Reference: Google Search Central