XML sitemap limits and common errors
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| URLs per sitemap file | 50,000 |
| Size per file | 50 MB (52,428,800 bytes) uncompressed |
| More than that | Split into several files and list them in a sitemap index |
| lastmod | W3C Datetime: 2026-10-17 or 2026-10-17T09:30:00+00:00 |
| loc | Absolute URL, same host as the sitemap (unless cross-submitted via robots.txt), entity-escaped |
Common problems
- Relative URLs in
<loc>. - http:// URLs in the sitemap of an https site.
- lastmod set to "now" on every build, which teaches search engines to ignore it.
- Sitemap not referenced in robots.txt (
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml). - A server returning HTML (a 200 "not found" page) at /sitemap.xml.
Validate a sitemap · API: GET /v1/sitemap-check?url=.
Source: sitemaps.org protocol.