I Built a Chrome Extension to Validate XML Sitemaps and Find Broken URLs

While working with websites, I noticed that validating an XML sitemap can become surprisingly tedious once it contains hundreds or thousands of URLs.

You can open the sitemap, inspect the XML, and check individual URLs — but that doesn't scale very well.

So I built a small Chrome extension to make this process faster.

What does it do?

The extension takes an XML sitemap and checks the URLs contained inside it.

It reports HTTP responses such as:

This makes it easier to identify URLs that may need attention during a technical SEO audit.

I wanted something lightweight for quick checks.

For a full website audit, a crawler makes sense. But sometimes you already have the sitemap and simply want to answer:

"Are the URLs inside this sitemap actually working?"

For that use case, I wanted something that could run directly from the browser.

The workflow is intentionally simple:

XML Sitemap
     ↓
Parse sitemap XML
     ↓
Extract URLs
     ↓
Check HTTP responses
     ↓
Group results
     ↓
Review problematic URLs

For larger sitemaps, the extension processes the URLs and gives you a summary instead of requiring you to inspect them individually.

I built it mainly with these users in mind:

This is still an evolving project.

Some features I'm considering are:

I'd especially like feedback from developers and SEO professionals who regularly work with XML sitemaps.

The extension is free and available on the Chrome Web Store:

If you work with XML sitemaps, I'd love to know:

What checks would you want a sitemap validator to perform?