Sitemap finder and checker
Fetch a live sitemap and check it against the spec.
Free and no signup. This one fetches the URL from our server; nothing about it is stored.
Give a bare domain and it looks at /sitemap.xml, which is where crawlers guess. This one runs from our server rather than your browser, so the address does leave your machine. Nothing about it is stored.
About this tool
The validator takes pasted XML; this one goes and gets it. Give it a bare domain and it looks at /sitemap.xml, which is where every crawler guesses when robots.txt does not say otherwise — so a 404 here is itself the finding, and a common one.
- A bare domain resolves to /sitemap.xml. If yours lives elsewhere, robots.txt is what tells crawlers, and a sitemap nothing points at is one nothing finds.
- The same checks as the validator: the unescaped ampersand first, because it invalidates the whole document and Search Console reports it as "could not read" without naming a line.
- Pointed at an index, the referenced sitemaps are listed so you can check each in turn.
- This fetches the file live, so it reflects what your server is serving now rather than what a crawler cached.
Questions
- Where should my sitemap live?
- Anywhere, as long as robots.txt points at it. /sitemap.xml is conventional because that is what crawlers guess when nothing tells them.
- Why does Search Console say my sitemap could not be read?
- Malformed XML — most often an unescaped ampersand, a missing namespace, or a truncated file. Any one invalidates the entire document.
- Should I submit the index or each sitemap?
- The index. Search engines follow it to every sitemap it lists, so one submitted URL covers all of them.