News Sitemap Validator – Check Your Google News Sitemap

A Google News sitemap is a special type of XML sitemap that contains only recent articles (published within the last 48 hours). Unlike regular sitemaps that list all your pages, a news sitemap is specifically designed to help Google News discover and index your fresh articles as quickly as possible.

Submitting a news sitemap to Google Search Console is one of the most effective ways to ensure your articles get indexed in Google News quickly — sometimes within minutes of publication. News sitemaps use a special XML namespace (xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9") to include news-specific metadata.

A valid Google News sitemap must follow this structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/article/breaking-news</loc>
    <news:news>
      <news:publication>
        <news:name>Example News</news:name>
        <news:language>en</news:language>
      </news:publication>
      <news:publication_date>2024-06-15T09:00:00Z</news:publication_date>
      <news:title>Breaking: Major Tech Announcement</news:title>
    </news:news>
  </url>
</urlset>

The news:keywords field is optional but can help Google understand your article's topic. Use up to 10 relevant keywords, separated by commas.

Our validator checks for these common news sitemap errors:

• Missing news namespace: The XML namespace for Google News must be declared in the urlset element.
• Stale articles: News sitemaps should only contain articles published in the last 48 hours. Older articles should be removed to keep the sitemap fresh.
• Wrong date format: Use W3C Datetime format: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ or YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+HH:MM
• Missing required fields: news:name, news:language, news:publication_date, and news:title are all required.
• Too many URLs: News sitemaps are limited to 1000 URLs. Use a sitemap index file if you publish more than 1000 articles per 2 days.
• Encoding issues: The sitemap must be UTF-8 encoded. Special characters must be XML-escaped.