Sitemap Inspector

What it's for

Check a sitemap.xml, the file that lists a site’s pages for search engines, before you submit it or after a search engine reports a problem with it. Mistakes such as a date in the wrong format, an address on another host or the same page listed twice are easy to miss in a long file.

For example, after moving a site, add the old sitemap as the earlier version to see every page that’s no longer listed, then make sure each has a redirect.

How to use it

Paste a sitemap or open one; a gzipped .xml.gz is unpacked for you. A sitemap index, which lists other sitemaps rather than pages, is checked in the same way. The summary gives the type, the number of entries and the hosts they’re on. Problems are grouped by kind, each with the entries it affects, numbered from the top of the file.

Every entry is listed with its last modified date, change frequency and priority; type in the filter box to narrow the list to addresses containing some text. Add an earlier version, pasted or opened (drop each file on its own box), to see the addresses added and removed, and the entries whose details changed, each with a Copy button.

Example

Press Try an example. The sitemap has five entries. The problems listed include a <lastmod> with a time but no time zone (entry 3), the same address as an earlier entry (entry 5), addresses on two hosts (www.example.com and example.com), and a mix of http:// and https://. Compared with the earlier version, /blog/ and http://example.com/contact were added, /old-page was removed, and the home page’s lastmod changed from 2026-09-01 to 2026-10-02.

Good to know

Nothing in the sitemap is fetched: the tool doesn’t check that the pages exist, that the sitemaps an index lists are valid, or that a search engine will accept or index anything. Addresses are compared exactly as written, so http:// and https://, or an address with and without a final /, count as different pages. Image, video, news and language extensions are recognised and counted, but their own fields aren’t checked. A file with a <!DOCTYPE> isn’t read.