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News sitemap validator

Is your news sitemap
valid?

Paste your news sitemap XML and see which articles break what Google documents: missing tags, bad dates, old URLs. Nothing is fetched or uploaded.

    A reading of the pasted text against Google's documentation, not Google's own parser. It requests no URL and checks no article. The two-day check uses your computer's clock. Nothing is uploaded.

    What Google says

    "Only include recent URLs for articles that were created in the last two days."

    "Each url sitemap tag can have only one news:news tag (plus the respective closing tag) and a sitemap may have up to 1,000 news:news tags."

    Quoted from Google's news sitemaps page, read on 2026-10-09. Google can change it, so treat that page as the final word. More: Google's news sitemap rules, Google's sitemap rules.

    Related: XML sitemap validator · sitemap generator · image sitemap generator · Article schema generator · Google's news sitemap rules. All free tools

    Free, no account, nothing leaves your browser.

    How to use it

    1. 1
      Paste your news sitemap

      Open the news sitemap XML in a browser, view the source, and paste it in. Up to 2 MB. A sitemap index is not followed: paste one sitemap.

    2. 2
      Read the chips

      You get the number of URLs, how many carry news:news, and the count of errors and warnings. Each finding names the URL and the tag.

    3. 3
      Fix and paste again

      Change the XML, paste it again and the findings update. Then check the real file in Search Console, which is the authority on what Google accepted.

    Questions

    What does it check?

    That the root is a urlset, that every news:news has one news:publication with news:name and news:language, plus news:publication_date and news:title; that there is only one news:news per url and no more than 1,000 in the file; that the language is an ISO 639 style code of two or three letters (or zh-cn, zh-tw); that the date is in one of the W3C formats Google lists; that news:name has no parentheses; and that the title does not contain the publication name.

    Why is an article flagged as older than two days?

    Google says to include only recent URLs for articles created in the last two days, and that once they are older you should either remove the URLs from the news sitemap or remove the news:news metadata from them. The tool compares news:publication_date with the clock of your computer. A date without a time is given the benefit of the doubt until the end of that day.

    Can the tool check news:name against Google News?

    No. Google says the name must exactly match the name as it appears on your articles on news.google.com, omitting anything in parentheses. The tool cannot look that up; it only flags parentheses.

    Is an empty news sitemap an error?

    No. Google says an Empty Sitemap warning in Search Console is only there to make sure it was intentional, and that an empty file will not cause problems with Google Search.

    Can it tell whether Google accepted the sitemap?

    No. It reads the text you paste against what Google documents. Search Console shows what Google actually processed, and Google can change its documentation.

    Is anything uploaded?

    No. The XML is parsed by JavaScript in your browser. Nothing is fetched and nothing is sent to a server.

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