What does the URL count actually measure?

It counts every distinct element inside a . If the same loc string appears more than once the total count is still incremented for each occurrence, while the "unique URLs" card shows only distinct values — the difference is reported as duplicates.

What is a sitemap index and how is it handled?

A sitemap index ( ) is a parent file that lists child sitemap files rather than individual URLs. The tool detects this automatically and reports how many child sitemaps are referenced. You need to open each child file separately to count its URLs; the total URL count across all children is not available without fetching each one.

Why does my sitemap show 0 priority or missing lastmod?

Both lastmod and priority are optional in the Sitemaps protocol. Many generators omit them to keep file size down. The coverage cards show the percentage that do carry each field so you can decide whether to populate them for stronger crawl signals.

What does path depth mean?

Path depth is the number of segments in the URL path — depth 0 is the root (/), depth 1 is /blog, depth 2 is /blog/post and so on. A high proportion of deep URLs (depth 3+) can indicate overly nested content that crawlers may visit less frequently.

My sitemap has multiple hostnames — is that a problem?

A sitemap should generally only reference URLs on the hostname it is served from, as many search engines ignore cross-origin entries in a sitemap. The hostname breakdown table makes any cross-domain entries immediately visible so you can correct them.

Can I use this with a sitemap index that references child sitemaps?

Yes. Paste the index XML and the tool will count and display the child sitemap references, show their hostname distribution and flag that these are sitemap references rather than individual page URLs. Paste each child file separately to analyse its URLs.

Sitemap URL Counter — Gera Tools

A sitemap URL counter built for SEOs, developers and site auditors who need to quickly understand the scale and metadata quality of any XML sitemap. Paste the raw XML and within milliseconds you have a total URL count, duplicate detection, metadata coverage statistics, a changefreq distribution, a priority breakdown and a path-depth analysis — all computed locally in your browser without uploading a single byte.

Why URL count matters

Search engines impose informal and formal crawl budgets on every site. Knowing exactly how many URLs are in your sitemap — and whether they carry complete metadata — directly affects how efficiently Googlebot, Bingbot and others discover your content. A sitemap with 10,000 entries but only 30% having lastmod values gives crawlers far weaker freshness signals than one where every URL carries an accurate date. The tool surfaces these gaps at a glance.

How it works

The tool uses the browser’s built-in DOMParser to parse the pasted XML against the application/xml MIME type, which gives native, spec-compliant XML parsing with no external dependencies. It then queries all <url> elements (for <urlset> sitemaps) or all <sitemap> elements (for <sitemapindex> files) and reads the child elements <loc>, <lastmod>, <priority> and <changefreq> from each.

Duplicate detection is performed by comparing the full set of <loc> strings against a Set — the difference between the total count and the set size is the duplicate count. Hostname extraction uses the browser’s URL constructor, so even non-standard ports and subdomains are parsed correctly. Path depth is calculated by splitting pathname on / and counting non-empty segments.

Worked example

A sitemap for a medium-sized blog might look like this after parsing:

Metric	Value
Total URLs	847
Unique URLs	847
Duplicates	0
Have lastmod	612 (72%)
Have priority	847 (100%)
Have changefreq	209 (25%)

The changefreq breakdown might reveal that 180 of the 209 entries use monthly, 20 use weekly (the homepage and category pages) and 9 use yearly (legal pages). The path-depth table shows 1 root URL at depth 0, 6 category URLs at depth 1 and 840 posts at depth 2 — a clean, shallow architecture that crawlers handle efficiently. The 75% lastmod coverage is a clear action item: the 235 posts with no lastmod should be updated to include the date they were last substantively edited.

Formula note

There is no arithmetic formula involved — the count is a direct DOM node count: document.querySelectorAll('url').length. The percentage figures for metadata coverage use (count_with_field / total_urls) * 100, rounded to one decimal place for display. Path depth uses pathname.split('/').filter(Boolean).length, which correctly handles trailing slashes by filtering empty segments.

Sitemap index vs urlset

The Sitemaps protocol allows two root elements. A <urlset> file is the standard format: it contains <url> entries, each with a <loc> and optional metadata. A <sitemapindex> file is a parent document that lists child sitemap files using <sitemap><loc> entries. Large sites (typically those with more than 50,000 URLs) split their URLs across multiple <urlset> files and reference all of them from a single index. The tool detects the root element automatically and switches between the two counting modes.