Sitemap checker & monitoring
Check your sitemap for broken links before Google finds them
Your sitemap is the list of pages you ask Google to visit. When a page is moved or deleted and the sitemap isn't updated, Google and your visitors hit dead ends. Check yours free below, then let Sitewatch re-check it every week.
- Crawls the URLs listed in your sitemap.xml
- Runs weekly (sampled for large sitemaps)
- Flags entries that return broken responses
Broken sitemap URLs detected
Affected entries
- /products/old-sku — 404 Not Foundthis week
- /blog/2019-promo — 404 Not Foundthis week
- 11 of 200 sitemap URLs brokenthis week
- 189 sitemap URLs healthythis week
Free sitemap checker
Check your sitemap for broken links
Enter your website and we'll find your sitemap, open up to 50 of its pages and show you which ones are broken or redirect. Free, no signup.
Your website, or your sitemap's address if you know it.
02The "up but rotting" problem
Dead URLs in your sitemap waste crawl budget and erode trust
Audits your own sitemap.xml
Sitewatch reads the URLs you tell search engines to crawl — the ones in your sitemap.xml — and checks that each still returns a healthy response.
Weekly scheduled crawl
Sitemap health runs as a separate weekly fan-out, independent of the per-check cycle. Large sitemaps are sampled so the audit stays efficient.
Broken-entry detection
Any sitemap URL that returns a 404, a server error, or an unexpected redirect is flagged with the exact URL — so you can fix or remove it.
Stop wasting crawl budget
Every dead URL Google crawls is budget not spent on your real pages. A sitemap full of 404s tells search engines your site is poorly maintained.
Protect SEO health
A slow, invisible decay — pages removed but never pruned from the sitemap — erodes how search engines value the whole site. This is exactly the kind of silent rot Sitewatch exists to catch.
Sampled in the free scan
A sampled sitemap check is part of the free, no-login public scan as well — a quick read on whether your sitemap is pointing at dead pages.
03Sitemap failure modes
How a sitemap quietly works against your SEO
Broken sitemap entries
- URLs that 404 — pages removed but never pruned from the sitemap
- URLs returning server errors
- URLs that redirect away from the listed address
- Entries left behind after a migration or restructure
Why it costs you
- Crawl budget spent on dead URLs instead of real pages
- Reduced trust signal from a poorly-maintained sitemap
- Slow, invisible SEO decay no uptime tool surfaces
04What you get
Outcomes, not a feature list.
Stop sending search engines to pages that no longer exist.
Your sitemap is the list you hand to Google. When it fills up with pages that have moved or been deleted, crawl budget gets spent on nothing and your real pages get visited less. Sitewatch audits the whole list every week.
Weekly
Sitemap URL audit cadence
Sampled
Efficient on large sitemaps
Exact URL
Every broken entry named
Find the dead links in your sitemap
Add a site and Sitewatch audits its sitemap weekly. Free plan, no credit card.
05FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Broken link monitoring checks the links embedded in your pages' HTML. Sitemap monitoring checks the URLs listed in your sitemap.xml — the addresses you explicitly tell search engines to crawl. A page can have zero broken on-page links while its sitemap still points at dozens of dead URLs.
Once a week, as a scheduled fan-out separate from the per-check cycle. For large sites the URLs are sampled so the audit stays fast and efficient rather than crawling thousands of entries every week.
Any URL in the sitemap that is missing, returns a server error, or redirects away from the address listed. Each broken entry is reported with its exact URL so you can fix the page or remove it from the sitemap.
Search engines treat your sitemap as a curated list of pages worth crawling. When many of those URLs are dead, you waste crawl budget on nothing and signal that the site is poorly maintained — a slow erosion of SEO health that no uptime monitor will ever show you.
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