Free Sitemap Checker

How to find the sitemap of a website, and what it should list.

A sitemap is the one page on your site written for machines only. Here is what it does, where crawlers look for it, why robots.txt should name it, and why the list itself deserves a read before anyone else reads it.

What a sitemap is, and what it does not do

An XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs on a site you want search engines to know about. The format is the Sitemaps protocol at sitemaps.org, published jointly by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in 2006, and it has barely changed since. Each entry is a <url> element holding a <loc>, the full address, and optionally a <lastmod> date for when the page last changed in a way that matters.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://yourdomain.com/services/estate-planning/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-14</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

A sitemap is a discovery aid. Google describes it as a hint about which pages exist and which changed, not an instruction: listing a page does not make Google crawl it, and it does not make Google index it or rank it. What the file does well is shorten the path to pages your internal links reach slowly or not at all, such as a new article, a deep archive page, or a page that only a form or a search box leads to. Google also says it ignores the protocol's <priority> and <changefreq> fields, and reads <lastmod> only on sites where the dates prove consistently accurate.

Where a sitemap lives

There is no single required address, which is why a sitemap finder has to look in more than one place. The first place is the site's own robots.txt: a Sitemap: line there is the owner saying exactly where the file is, and it is the one lookup that never has to guess. After that come the addresses platforms use by default. This checker tries them in the order below, on the exact host you typed, and stops at the first that returns a real sitemap.

To find the sitemap URL by hand, open /robots.txt in a browser and look for the line; if it is not there, try the addresses above. For your own site, Search Console's Sitemaps report shows every sitemap submitted for the property and when Google last read each one. The host matters: www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com are separate hosts to a crawler, and each serves its own robots.txt.

The robots.txt Sitemap line

The declaration is one line: the field name, a colon and the sitemap's full URL. It is not part of any User-agent group, so it can sit anywhere in the file and every crawler that reads robots.txt sees it, whatever rules apply to it. A site can list several, one per line, which is how a site with separate sitemaps for articles, locations and images points at all of them.

# access rules for crawlers
User-agent: *
Disallow: /client-portal/

# the declaration, outside any group
Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml

The URL must be absolute, with the scheme and host written out. A relative path such as Sitemap: /sitemap.xml is not valid under the protocol, and this checker does not follow one. Declaring the file is not required by Google, but it is the only way to reach every crawler at once without an account with each search engine, which is why the check for it exists at all. For how the rest of the file controls access, the Robots.txt Checker reads it group by group.

Sitemap index files and child sitemaps

A sitemap index is a sitemap of sitemaps: a <sitemapindex> root whose entries point at other sitemap files instead of pages. The protocol caps one sitemap file at 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed, so large sites have to split, and most CMSs split by content type anyway, one child for posts, one for pages, one for authors. When this checker finds an index, it reports how many child sitemaps it lists and shows the first ten addresses; it does not open them, so the number of pages behind an index is not known from this card. Checking each child's structure and limits is what the Sitemap Validator is for.

Submitting it to Google and Bing

Beyond the robots.txt line, you can submit the sitemap URL directly: in Google Search Console under Sitemaps, and in Bing Webmaster Tools under Sitemaps. Submission is useful for your own reporting, because each tool then shows when it last read the file and how many URLs it found, but it is a second route to the same file rather than a replacement for the declaration. Google retired its old sitemap "ping" endpoint in 2023, so there is no longer an anonymous way to tell Google a sitemap changed; it rereads files it already knows on its own schedule.

When a sitemap exists but crawlers cannot read it

The most common way to have a sitemap that does nothing is to have one that does not load. A declared address that returns 404 after a redesign. A sitemap URL that redirects to the homepage, so the crawler receives an HTML page where it expected XML. A security plugin or CDN rule that answers crawlers with a challenge page. A staging robots.txt that shipped to production still pointing at the staging host. This checker treats every one of those as no answer and moves on to the next address, and when robots.txt names a sitemap that did not load, the card says so by name rather than quietly reporting the one it found elsewhere.

Is this the list you meant to publish?

Most sitemap tools treat a bigger URL count as a better result. For a firm in a regulated industry, the count is a different question. A sitemap is a public inventory of every page the firm is still asking search engines, and the crawlers behind AI answers, to read. Generated sitemaps list whatever the CMS still holds as published, which means they faithfully keep listing the pages nobody meant to keep: a withdrawn offering, a departed advisor's bio, last year's fee schedule, a disclosure that has since been superseded, a landing page for a campaign that ended.

That is why this card leads with the number and the first entries rather than a pass mark. If an adviser site you expect to hold forty pages lists three hundred, or the first entries include pages you retired, the sitemap is telling crawlers to keep reading something the firm no longer stands behind. Taking a page out of the sitemap does not remove it from Google; a retired page should return 404 or 410, or redirect to its replacement, and then drop out of the sitemap on its own. The sitemap is simply where the gap between what you publish and what you meant to publish shows up first.

Common mistakes

• No Sitemap line in robots.txt. The file exists and crawlers that guess /sitemap.xml find it, but nothing declares it, and a sitemap at any other address is invisible to them.
• A declared URL that no longer loads. The line survives a platform move while the file moves elsewhere. A crawler that trusts the declaration gets a 404.
• A relative Sitemap line. Sitemap: /sitemap.xml is not a URL under the protocol. Write it out in full.
• The sitemap redirects to the homepage. Common after a theme or plugin change. The crawler receives HTML, and the report in Search Console says the file could not be read.
• Declaring the wrong host. A robots.txt on www pointing at a sitemap full of apex URLs, or the reverse. Pick one host and use it everywhere.
• Listing pages that are blocked, redirected or noindexed. A sitemap should hold the canonical, indexable version of each page and nothing else. Mixed signals waste the crawl the sitemap was meant to save.
• Dates that are not true. Setting every <lastmod> to today on each build teaches Google to ignore the field for the whole site.
• Never reading it. Retired pages accumulate in generated sitemaps for years. Read the list after every restructure, not only the count.