Sitemap Generator

A sitemap.xml file is an XML document listing the URLs on a site, optionally along with metadata like when a page was last modified, how often it tends to change, and a relative priority. Its main job is to help search engine crawlers discover pages, which matters most for larger sites, pages with few internal links pointing to them, or newly published content that hasn't been indexed yet.

Once generated, a sitemap is normally submitted directly through tools like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, and referenced from robots.txt with a Sitemap directive so crawlers that check robots.txt first can find it automatically. It's worth noting that Google has said it largely ignores the changefreq and priority values in practice, relying instead on its own crawling patterns and the lastmod date, so those fields are more of a hint than something search engines strictly follow.

A sitemap makes pages easier to discover, but it doesn't force them to be indexed — search engines still decide independently whether a page is worth adding to their index based on content quality and other signals. There are also format limits to keep in mind: a single sitemap file is capped at 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed, so larger sites need a sitemap index file that references multiple smaller sitemap files.