How to Validate a Sitemap Before Submitting It
A broken sitemap wastes crawl budget and hides pages. Learn the quick validation checks to run before every submission.
What is the Sitemap Validator?
The Sitemap Validator parses your XML, counts url entries and flags entries missing a loc element, catching the most common sitemap errors before submission.
How to use it
- Paste your sitemap XML.
- Click Validate sitemap.
- Fix any reported problems and re-check.
Worked example
A sitemap with 120 url entries and no missing loc tags passes cleanly.
What is the most common sitemap error?
Malformed XML — one unclosed tag or unescaped & breaks the whole file. Validate before submitting, every time.
Frequently asked questions
What does it not check?
It does not fetch your URLs or check they return 200 — use Search Console for live crawl results.
What is a loc element?
The <loc> tag inside each <url> entry holds that page's full URL.