A broken sitemap is a silent SEO problem: search engines just stop crawling new pages. The ChrysoKit Sitemap Validator checks the structure, the URLs and the most common pitfalls in one pass.
Why use it
Most sitemap tools either validate or audit, not both. We do both, and we do it client-side so private staging URLs are not sent to a third party.
How to use the Sitemap Validator
- Paste the sitemap XML, or fetch it by URL if it is public.
- Read the structural validation result.
- Scan the warnings list for SEO smells (missing lastmod, suspect priorities).
- Fix and re-run until everything is green.
Features worth knowing
Schema check
Validates against the standard sitemap protocol.
URL audit
Flags relative URLs, mixed-case hostnames and trailing-slash inconsistencies.
Warnings, not just errors
Points out things that are technically valid but probably wrong.
Pro tips
- Keep individual sitemaps under 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Split with a sitemap index when you exceed either.
- lastmod dates should be real. Updating them all to today every deploy teaches search engines to ignore the field.
- Priority and changefreq are advisory. Most search engines ignore them; do not lose sleep tuning them.
Privacy first. The Sitemap Validator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server.
Run new and changed sitemaps through the validator before submitting them. It catches in seconds what would otherwise take a week to notice.
Open the tool: Sitemap Validator →
Cleaning up "Submitted but not indexed": a Search Console triage
The report every site owner eventually meets: Search Console shows 412 URLs submitted via sitemap, 261 indexed, and a long grey list of exclusions. The instinct is to treat it as Google's problem; the productive move is to treat the sitemap as the suspect and validate it line by line.
A real cleanup session sorts the exclusions into buckets with different fixes. URLs returning 301: the sitemap listed old addresses after a restructure... replace them with final destinations, since a sitemap should never make a crawler chase redirects. "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical": the sitemap listed both the parameter version and the clean version of the same pages... list only canonicals. "Crawled, currently not indexed" on thin tag-archive pages: those pages should not have been submitted at all; a sitemap is a curated list of pages worth indexing, not a database dump of every route that returns 200.
After the pass, the sitemap shrank from 412 URLs to 287... and within weeks the indexed proportion looked dramatically healthier, partly through genuine indexing gains and partly because the denominator stopped lying. That is the underappreciated function of sitemap hygiene: Search Console can only diagnose discovery problems clearly when the sitemap states the site's intentions precisely. A validator catches the syntax errors instantly; the curation discipline is the part only the owner can supply.