Sitemap Inspector

What you can do

• Count how many URLs a sitemap contains.
• See how many pages a website lists, grouped by path like /blog or /products.
• Fetch a sitemap by URL, with automatic discovery via robots.txt and the usual locations.
• Check a sitemap against the protocol rules: the 50,000 URL and 50 MB limits, valid dates, priorities and changefreq values.
• Find duplicate URLs, plain http entries and URLs on unexpected hosts.
• See how fresh a sitemap is from its lastmod dates, by year and at a glance.
• Open a sitemap index and load its child sitemaps into one combined report.
• Read gzipped sitemaps (.xml.gz) without unpacking them first.
• Search the full URL list and export it as TXT or CSV.

How to use the Sitemap Inspector

1. 1Load a sitemap: type a website or sitemap URL and press Fetch, paste the XML, or drop in the file. Several files merge into one report.
2. 2If the sitemap is an index, load the child sitemaps you care about, or all of them at once.
3. 3Read the overview for URL counts, hosts and freshness, and go through the health checks.
4. 4Switch the path breakdown between depth 1, 2 and 3 to see where the site's pages live.
5. 5Filter the URL list if you are looking for something specific, then copy or download it.

When fetching by URL does not work

The browser itself makes the fetch, and browsers only allow reading another site's files when that site permits it through CORS headers. Many sites do not, so the request can be blocked even though the sitemap is publicly reachable. When that happens the tool tells you and links the sitemap so you can open it in a new tab, save it, and load it through the upload option instead. Your own sites, and sites that serve their sitemap with open CORS headers, fetch fine.

Given a bare domain, the tool first reads robots.txt for Sitemap: lines, then tries common locations like /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml until one answers.

What the health checks look for

The checks follow the rules from sitemaps.org and what search engines document. A single sitemap file may hold at most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed, larger sites must split into multiple files behind a sitemap index. Every URL must be absolute, and entries only count for the host the sitemap lives on unless robots.txt says otherwise. On top of the hard rules, the tool flags things that waste crawl budget or erode trust: duplicate URLs, lastmod dates in the future, malformed dates, and priority or changefreq values outside what the protocol defines.

Google has said it ignores priority and changefreq and reads lastmod only when it proves reliable, so treat those fields as hints, not levers. An honest lastmod is still the one field worth maintaining, it helps crawlers pick up changed pages sooner.

Reading the path breakdown

The path breakdown groups every URL by the start of its path, so at depth 1 all of /blog/... counts into one /blog row and you see at a glance how a site's pages are distributed. Depth 2 and 3 split those groups further, for example into /blog/2024 and /blog/2025. This is a quick way to size the sections of a site, spot unexpectedly large areas, or verify that a section you expected is actually in the sitemap.

The extracted URL list can go straight into other tools, for example the Dedupe Lines to clean it up or the Sort Lines to order it. For a single URL, the URL Parser takes it apart.