Free tool
Sitemap Checker
Enter your website and see whether your sitemap is valid, current and trustworthy: URLs, lastmod dates, broken links and robots.txt reference.
Sitemap questions
What does the sitemap checker test?
It finds your sitemap through robots.txt or the default locations, checks that it is valid XML, counts URLs, flags duplicates, URLs on another domain, http URLs and query-string URLs, validates lastmod dates, follows up to five child sitemaps and spot-checks that listed URLs return a success status.
Why does a sitemap matter for AI search?
AI search crawlers and the search indexes behind them discover pages through links and sitemaps. A clean sitemap with accurate lastmod dates helps new and updated pages get found sooner. It does not guarantee indexing or citations.
What is a good lastmod value?
The real date a page's content last changed, in YYYY-MM-DD or full W3C datetime format. Setting every page to the build date makes the signal useless, so crawlers learn to ignore it.
How do I tell crawlers where the sitemap is?
Add a line to robots.txt: Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Also submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
What are the sitemap limits?
Each sitemap file can hold up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Larger sites split into several files listed in a sitemap index.
Is the checker free?
Yes. You can run up to 20 checks per month without an account.
Related: the robots.txt generator can add your Sitemap line, and the technical AEO guide covers the rest of the checklist.