XML Sitemap Generator & Checker

Complete guide to XML sitemaps

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable list of page URLs on your site. Search engines can use it to discover content you care about, especially on large sites or sites with pages that are hard to reach through navigation alone. Publishing a sitemap does not force crawling or indexing, and it does not improve rankings by itself.

Generate versus check

Generate builds a new urlset from a website crawl or a manual URL list so you can download sitemap.xml. Check inspects a sitemap you already have (uploaded file or public URL). You can validate XML only, or validate XML and optionally check a sample of live page URLs.

Structural validation covers malformed XML, missing loc values, invalid URLs, duplicates, bad optional lastmod dates, and protocol limits. Live checking makes HTTP requests to a bounded sample of listed pages (and fetches child sitemaps from an index within safe limits). Untested URLs are not assumed healthy. A valid document can still list pages that redirect, return errors, or carry noindex.

URL set versus sitemap index

A standard sitemap uses a urlset root and lists page URLs. A sitemapindex lists other sitemap files when a site needs more than one sitemap (for example beyond 50,000 URLs or about 50 MB uncompressed). This checker validates index structure and lists child sitemap URLs; it does not automatically fetch every child file in this stage.

Why valid XML is not enough for Google

Search engines may ignore sitemap entries that are blocked, canonicalised elsewhere, redirected, or marked noindex. Valid structure only means the file is readable as a sitemap. Indexing still depends on crawl access, content quality, and each engine's own selection process.

Crawl limit versus sitemap protocol limits

Automatic discovery here stops at 500 HTML pages per crawl (with a time budget and request limits). That is a WebFixer safety cap, not a Google limit.

The XML sitemap protocol itself allows up to 50,000 URLs and about 50 MB uncompressed in a single file. This generator warns as your list approaches those protocol limits. Sites that need more URLs should split into several sitemap files and point to them from a sitemap index (this tool does not build the index for you).

Which URLs to include

List pages you want discovered: the homepage, important landing pages, articles, product or service pages, and other useful canonical HTML pages that return a normal success response and are meant to be indexed.

Leave out redirects, error pages, login/account/checkout flows, internal search results, thin tag archives you do not want crawled, and other duplicates when a stronger canonical URL already exists. The crawler already skips many low-value patterns and pages marked noindex, but you should still review the list before publishing.

Upload and submit

Download sitemap.xml and upload it so it is publicly reachable, commonly at https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. You can host it at another path if you prefer, as long as the URL returns the XML file.

Add a Sitemap: line in robots.txt (the Robots.txt Generator can help). Then submit the sitemap URL in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools if you use them. After it is live, the SEO audit can check whether /sitemap.xml on that origin is reachable and looks like valid XML.

lastmod, changefreq and priority

lastmod is an optional last-modified date. Include it only when you know a real date. Setting every URL to today is unhelpful. In this tool you can append | YYYY-MM-DD on a line; during a crawl, a date may also come from a reliable Last-Modified response header or from an existing sitemap entry when present.

changefreq and priority are optional legacy hints. Modern Google documentation treats them as low-value; this generator does not emit them.

Example XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-03-01</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/about</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

Common problems

• Listing redirecting or non-canonical URLs instead of the final preferred URL.
• Serving an HTML error page at the sitemap path (the SEO audit can flag invalid sitemap XML).
• Pasting relative paths; this generator only accepts absolute http:// or https:// URLs.
• Assuming a submitted sitemap means every URL will be indexed.

Limitations

The crawler is HTTP-based only: no JavaScript rendering, so client-rendered routes may be missed. Coverage is capped at 500 pages per run and may stop earlier on the time budget. There is no sitemap-index builder and no image or news sitemap extensions. The checker processes up to 2 MB per upload or fetched document in this tool and does not crawl child sitemaps from an index yet.

FAQ