This XML sitemap generator builds the file that lists the URLs you want search engines to find, with optional dates and hints for each one. Google says a sitemap helps it discover pages, especially on new or large sites, but doesn't guarantee that every URL will be crawled and indexed. You can start from a crawl of your site, URLs typed or pasted in, a .txt or .csv file, or a list of sitemaps for a sitemap index, then copy or download the result.
How to generate a sitemap with the XML sitemap generator
- On the Crawl Site tab, enter your Domain URL.
- Pick a Depth Limit from 1 to 5 (3 is the default) and a Max Pages value. Every option, including Unlimited, stops at 500 pages.
- Press Crawl Site. Found URLs appear as they are discovered, and the crawl stops after about 3 minutes.
- When it finishes, the tool switches to Manual Entry with one row per URL. Edit, reorder or delete rows there.
- Set the Output Options, press Generate Sitemap, then Copy or Download.
The five input modes
| Tab | What it does | Runs on |
|---|---|---|
| Crawl Site | Follows links on your domain, up to 5 levels and 500 pages | Our server |
| Manual Entry | Rows with URL, Priority, Change Freq and Last Modified; drag to reorder | Your browser |
| Bulk Paste | One URL per line, with a default priority, change frequency and date | Your browser |
| Import File | Reads URLs from a .txt or .csv file | Your browser |
| Sitemap Index | Lists sitemap files and downloads sitemap-index.xml | Your browser |
What the crawler includes and skips
The crawler reads the links on each page and keeps those on the same domain, treating www and non-www as one site. It skips links to files such as images, PDFs, CSS, JavaScript, XML, archives, audio, video and fonts, and URLs with three or more query parameters. It also removes #fragments and the trailing slash from every URL except the homepage, so /blog/ is listed as /blog. If your canonical URLs end in a slash, fix those rows before you generate the file.
Avoid "zombie" pages
I've seen sitemaps where only a small share of the listed URLs were still live. The crawler adds every link it finds without checking whether a page redirects, returns an error or carries noindex, and pages at the depth limit are listed without being fetched. Delete those rows in Manual Entry so the map holds only your published pages; the redirect checker shows where a doubtful URL ends up, and canonical tags explained covers which version of a URL to list.
Priority and changefreq
Don't set every page to priority 1.0. If every page claims top priority, the value says nothing. I set my homepage to 1.0, category pages to 0.8 and individual blog posts to 0.6. Google says it ignores priority and changefreq, though, and uses lastmod only when the dates are consistently accurate. After a crawl, the XML sitemap generator gives the start page 1.0 and every other URL 0.8, weekly and today's date, so change each row to its real last update or untick the fields you don't want under Output Options.
Example XML sitemap output
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2026-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/shop?color=red&size=m</loc>
<lastmod>2026-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>The sitemap.xml generator escapes special characters, so the ampersand in the shop URL is written as &, as XML requires. Minified output puts the same file on one line. The check above the output flags URLs without http:// or https://, URLs over 2,048 characters and duplicates. Ticking Include image namespace adds the image namespace declaration only; the tool does not add image entries.
The sitemaps protocol allows 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file. The generator does not split large lists, so for a bigger site build several sitemaps and list them on the Sitemap Index tab.
Upload the file to your site, add a Sitemap line with the robots.txt generator, and submit it in Search Console. Other crawling and markup tools are in the SEO tools section.
