Sitemap of www.nytimes.com.
Find a site's sitemap, check it against the sitemap protocol, and see whether the addresses it lists really answer.
Looking up…
What the protocol asks.
- A
<urlset>of<url><loc>entries in thehttp://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9namespace, or a<sitemapindex>that lists sitemaps. - At most 50,000 entries and 50 MB uncompressed per file; gzip is allowed.
- Full addresses on the sitemap's own host, and
<lastmod>dates in W3C format such as2026-10-10.
What search engines value.
Only pages you want found: final addresses that answer 200, not redirects, errors or pages marked noindex. Accurate lastmod dates help; Google ignores priority and changefreq. Point to the sitemap from robots.txt and submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Questions people ask.
What does a valid XML sitemap need?
A <urlset> (or a <sitemapindex> for several sitemaps) in the sitemaps.org namespace, absolute addresses on the site's own host, at most 50,000 entries and 50 MB uncompressed per file, and dates in W3C format.
Where should the sitemap be?
Anywhere on the site, but list it in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line so every search engine finds it. The checker looks there first, then at /sitemap.xml.
Do priority and changefreq matter?
Google ignores both. An accurate lastmod date is what helps search engines know which pages changed.
Should a sitemap list redirects?
No. List the final address of each page, the one that answers 200 and is its own canonical; redirects and errors waste the crawl.
My site has more than 50,000 pages. What now?
Split the list into several sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index; the index file follows the same limits.
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Sources
By Hivex. Updated 10 October 2026. Addresses are fetched live from Hivex's servers; page contents are never read or stored.