Sitemap Validator: Check Your XML, URLs and hreflang

A sitemap is a promise: these are the pages that matter, and they all work. When it lists dead pages or redirects, crawlers learn to trust it less.

Search crawlers that feed AI products use sitemaps to find pages. A clean one gets new content discovered faster. Broken hreflang does a different kind of damage, sending people and answer engines to the wrong language version.

How to use it

1. Enter your domain.
2. We look for sitemaps in robots.txt, then /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml, and read sitemap indexes and gzip files.
3. We sample up to 50 URLs spread across the file and request each for its status code.

What the checks mean

• XML validity. The file must be well-formed with a urlset or sitemapindex root.
• Limits. 50,000 URLs and 50 MB per file. Over that, split into several files.
• Sample errors. Any 404 or redirect in the sample is flagged. List final, working URLs only.
• hreflang reciprocity. If page A lists page B as an alternate, page B must list page A back.

For very large sites we read a limited number of child sitemaps and tell you what we covered, so the result is a sample, not a full audit.

Try it

Open the tool at getbotrank.com/tools/sitemap-validator. It is free, needs no signup, and uses no AI model. If you want to know whether AI engines actually mention your brand, the full AI visibility scan tests that directly. You can also browse all free tools.