Technical SEO
Sitemap Finder and Validator
Enter your domain. We locate your sitemap from robots.txt or the usual paths, count the URLs, and flag the common problems that keep pages out of the index.
How the check finds your sitemap, and what it reads
It reads your robots.txt first and follows any Sitemap line it finds there. If there is none, it tries the common paths a crawler would guess. The Source figure in the result tells you which of the two worked, and seeing common paths there is itself a finding: add the Sitemap line to robots.txt, because that is the line every crawler reads first.
From there it follows a sitemap index into the child files, up to five files and 200 URLs, counts the entries, counts how many carry a lastmod date, and lists a sample. URLs pointing at another hostname are dropped, matching how engines treat them.
One expectation worth resetting: a sitemap is a discovery aid, not a ranking input. Listing a page does not get it indexed, and on a small site where every page is linked from the navigation, leaving a page out does not get it dropped. Sitemaps earn their keep on large sites, on pages that are weakly linked internally, and as the fastest way to tell an engine what changed.
A sitemap that passes, and how to point at it
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2026-07-14</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/pricing</loc>
<lastmod>2026-08-02</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>https://example.com/sitemap-pages.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2026-08-02</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>https://example.com/sitemap-blog.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2026-08-11</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
# in robots.txt, at the root of the domain
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
A single sitemap file holds up to 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed, and past either limit you need an index. A lastmod that updates on every deploy for every URL is noise, and engines learn to discount it, so set it from when the content changed rather than when the file was rebuilt.
Sitemap questions
The tool found no sitemap but I know we have one.
Three causes cover most cases. It is not referenced in robots.txt and does not sit at a path a crawler would guess. It returns something other than a 200, often an HTML error page dressed up as XML. Or it is served from a different hostname than the one you entered, such as a CDN subdomain. Adding the Sitemap line to robots.txt fixes the first and rules out the third.
How much does a missing lastmod matter?
Modestly, and mostly at scale. On a large site it tells a crawler which of 40,000 URLs are worth re-fetching, which is real budget saved. On a 20 page site the crawler will re-fetch everything anyway. An inaccurate lastmod is worse than none, because it trains engines to ignore the field on your domain.
Should the sitemap list every URL on my site?
Only the ones you want indexed: canonical, 200-responding, and not carrying a noindex. Including redirects, parameter duplicates, or pages you have marked noindex sends mixed instructions and reduces how much the file gets trusted. A short honest sitemap outperforms a long contradictory one.
Do AI engines use sitemaps?
Indirectly, and it depends on the engine. Most AI retrieval runs against a search index that was built with the help of sitemaps, so discovery still flows through the file even when the answer engine never fetched it. The Google surfaces benefit the most, since they read Google's index directly.
Previews the Technical Agent
Check it once here. Rankfastt keeps an eye on your sitemap and the pages in it so a silent drop does not cost you rankings.