Is your sitemap helping or hurting?
Paste your XML sitemap and get an instant structural audit: duplicates, mixed protocols, missing dates, size limits and inconsistent URLs that quietly waste crawl budget.
A structural audit in seconds.
Open your sitemap
Most sites serve it at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. WordPress with Yoast or RankMath usually uses /sitemap_index.xml.
Paste the XML
We parse the loc and lastmod elements locally in your browser and evaluate the file against the sitemap protocol plus common crawl-efficiency mistakes.
Fix what is flagged
Duplicates, http URLs and parameter URLs are the highest-value fixes because each one consumes crawl budget that should be spent on pages that matter.
Sitemaps waste crawl budget quietly.
A sitemap is a hint, not a command. It tells search engines which URLs you consider worth crawling. What it cannot do is force anything into the index, and treating it as an indexing tool leads to a lot of wasted effort.
Where sitemaps genuinely help is efficiency. A clean sitemap points crawlers at the right pages with accurate change dates. A messy one, full of redirects, duplicates and parameter URLs, actively sends crawlers to pages that do not matter.
On a small site this is harmless. On a large site it is expensive, because crawl budget is finite: every request spent on a duplicate is a request not spent on the page you actually want indexed.
The limits are worth knowing: 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per sitemap, one hostname per file, and an index file when you exceed that. If you need to know what crawlers are truly doing rather than what they were invited to do, that is a question for server log analysis.
Sitemap questions.
Where do I find my sitemap?
Try yoursite.com/sitemap.xml first. WordPress sites using Yoast or RankMath typically serve /sitemap_index.xml. Your robots.txt file also usually declares the location on a line beginning with Sitemap.
Does submitting a sitemap get my pages indexed?
No. A sitemap helps discovery, but indexing is a separate decision made after evaluating the page. A URL can be crawled promptly and still be excluded because of a noindex tag, a canonical pointing elsewhere, duplication, or simply insufficient value relative to what is already indexed.
What are the size limits?
Each sitemap may contain up to 50,000 URLs and must not exceed 50 MB uncompressed. Beyond that, split into multiple sitemaps and reference them from a sitemap index file.
Should every page be in my sitemap?
No. Include the canonical, indexable pages you want crawled. Leave out redirects, noindexed pages, parameter duplicates and thin utility pages. A shorter, cleaner sitemap is more useful than an exhaustive one.
Do lastmod dates matter?
Yes, when they are accurate. They help crawlers prioritise genuinely changed content. If your CMS updates lastmod on every page whenever anything changes, the signal becomes noise and is likely to be ignored, so inaccurate dates are worse than none.
Want to see what crawlers actually did?
A sitemap shows what you invited. Server logs show what happened. We analyze real crawler behaviour, find wasted budget and hand you a prioritised fix list.