Free XML Sitemap Generator

What Is an XML Sitemap Generator?

Quick answer: An xml sitemap generator is a website crawler with one job: it follows the internal links it finds from the address you type, then writes the URLs that belong in a sitemap into a sitemap.xml file you can copy or download. Use it on a new website or after a site migration.

The file only suggests URLs to crawlers such as Googlebot. Google explains when you might need a sitemap. A new site, or one with many pages nobody links to, gains most. Enter your address above to crawl a website with this free sitemap generator.

How to Generate an XML Sitemap in Four Steps

1. Type your address into "Enter a Website URL". A bare name such as example.com is read as https://example.com, and a typed path such as /blog becomes the start page.
2. Press "Generate Sitemap". A progress card shows a Discovered ring, Added and Skipped counters, the Current page, Estimated remaining time and a "Cancel the process" button, which still returns what was found.
3. When the crawl ends, the result opens as a table you can filter, with a Raw XML button that shows the file itself. Use "Copy to Clipboard" or "Download Sitemap", which always saves sitemap.xml.
4. Upload the file to your root directory, add a Sitemap: directive to robots.txt (use our robots.txt generator to build the file, and this guide on how to create a robots.txt file explains the directive), then submit sitemap.xml in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

In our tests, example.com, a single page, finished in a few seconds.

What the Crawler Puts in Your Sitemap

Each URL becomes one entry in a urlset, with up to four fields from the sitemaps.org protocol. The file uses UTF-8 encoding with entity escaping, so an ampersand in a URL stays valid XML.

The crawler never writes the time it fetched a page. It uses a date the page states about itself, then the date in your own sitemap, then a Last-Modified header at least a week old, because a fresher header often marks a cache refresh, not an edit. A date that many pages share is treated as a build stamp and left out. If you know the true change dates, add them before you upload.

URLs from your existing sitemap.xml (found via robots.txt, /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml, unless you cancel or hit the cap) are queued and fetched like any other page, so each one passes the same checks. Its lastmod value is used only when the page states no date of its own.

How Many Pages Can the Sitemap Generator Crawl?

This online sitemap generator gives guests 600 URLs, which also protects your crawl budget. A free account gets 2,000. Every crawl also stops starting new pages after about 900 seconds, and never goes deeper than link depth 10.

The Google Search Central sitemap guide sets that 50,000 URL and 50 MB limit, so our caps sit far below it. We never reached either cap live; our own site is below 600 pages.

At the cap the crawl stops and the file holds what it found, and the result says that more pages exist. Typing a path does not limit the crawl: a test that started at /vs also returned /, /about-us and category pages. Crawl speed depends on how quickly your server answers.

What the Crawler Skips, and What It Can Miss

It follows ordinary links in the HTML your server sends. Pages that exist only after client-side scripts run are missed, and so are orphan pages without internal links, unless your existing sitemap lists them.

Skipped or left out: pages a robots.txt rule blocks for SEOSiteCheckerBot or the older name SitemapBot (Google's matching rules apply), any status code other than 200, non-HTML types, pages over 3 MB, addresses ending in PDF, CSS or ZIP, links with action= in the query, pages behind a bot-protection challenge, and addresses that redirect to another website.

It reads the robots meta tag, the X-Robots-Tag header and the canonical tag of every page it fetches, and leaves out a page that says noindex or names another address as canonical. It cannot see tags added by JavaScript. Pagination such as ?page=2 and tag archives are crawled last and stay in at a low priority, so delete any you do not want.

Localhost, private addresses and ports other than 80, 443, 8080 and 8443 are refused.

Check the Sitemap Before You Submit It

The crawler checks status, noindex, canonical and host for every page it lists, and the result counts the pages it left out by reason. Skim the loc lines for pages you do not want public, such as thank-you pages and internal search results, and look for pages you expected but cannot find, because pages built only by scripts are invisible to a crawler.

Then audit what this xml sitemap generator left you. The free SEO score checker grades the crawlable pages, the meta tag analyzer shows noindex and canonical tags on one URL, the Open Graph validator checks share tags, the schema markup validator covers structured data, and our public SEO reports show a full audit.

Is It Safe to Crawl Your Site With This Tool?

The crawler identifies itself as SEOSiteCheckerBot with a link to our bot page, so you can find it in your logs. It requests one page at a time, at least a quarter of a second apart (longer when your robots.txt sets a Crawl-delay, up to 10 seconds), and sends no cookies, so it sees what an anonymous visitor sees and adds little load. Results sit in a temporary folder under a random ID, cleared after about 2 hours.

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