How to Find, Validate, and Submit Your Sitemap to Google
If you want Google to find and index all the pages on your website, a properly configured XML sitemap is one of the most important things you can have. Yet many website owners either don't have one, have one with errors, or have never submitted it to Google. This guide covers everything you need to know.
What Is an XML Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website along with metadata about each page — when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is relative to other pages.
Google uses this file to discover your pages more efficiently. Without a sitemap, Google's crawler (Googlebot) must find your pages by following links. With a sitemap, you're handing Google a complete directory of everything you want indexed.
How to Find Your Website's Sitemap
Most websites have their sitemap at one of these standard locations:
yourdomain.com/sitemap.xmlyourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xmlyourdomain.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml
You can also check your robots.txt file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt — most websites include a Sitemap: directive that points directly to the sitemap URL.
MixTool's Sitemap Finder automates this process — enter any domain and it checks all standard locations and robots.txt automatically, reporting which sitemaps exist and how many URLs each one contains.
How to Validate Your Sitemap
A sitemap with errors can actually harm your indexing. Common issues include:
- Invalid XML format — a single misplaced character can break the entire file
- Missing required tags — every URL entry needs a
<loc>tag at minimum - Invalid priority values —
<priority>must be between 0.0 and 1.0 - Invalid changefreq values — must be one of: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never
- URLs with errors — pointing to 404 pages or redirects
Use MixTool's Sitemap Validator to check your sitemap for all of these issues. You can paste the sitemap XML directly or enter the URL, and the tool reports a full validation result with error details.
Extracting URLs from a Sitemap
If you want to see exactly which pages are listed in your sitemap — for auditing, analysis, or bulk indexing requests — you need to extract the URLs.
MixTool's Sitemap URL Extractor fetches any publicly accessible sitemap and lists all the <loc> URLs in a searchable, exportable format. You can copy all URLs at once, filter by keyword, or download the list as a TXT or CSV file.
How to Submit Your Sitemap to Google
1. Log in to Google Search Console at search.google.com/search-console.
2. Select your property (your website).
3. Click "Sitemaps" in the left sidebar under "Indexing."
4. Enter your sitemap URL in the field provided (just the path, e.g., sitemap.xml).
5. Click Submit.
Google will crawl your sitemap and begin processing the URLs. The "Last read" timestamp will update once Google has processed it.
How Often Should You Resubmit?
You don't need to manually resubmit your sitemap every time you add new pages — Google checks it periodically. However, you should resubmit if:
- You've made major changes to your site structure
- You've added a large batch of new pages
- You've recently fixed sitemap errors
For websites that publish new content frequently (blogs, news sites, e-commerce), most CMS platforms automatically update the sitemap when new content is published.
Getting your sitemap right is one of the highest-impact technical SEO tasks you can do. Start by finding and validating your sitemap with MixTool's free Sitemap Finder and Sitemap Validator today.