Sitemap Generator – Create an XML Sitemap for Your Site
About the Sitemap Generator
This generator produces a valid XML sitemap you can upload and submit to Google Search Console. Paste your own list of URLs, or enter a domain and let the tool read the homepage and pull out the internal links it finds. Set a change frequency and priority, and it writes the complete sitemap.xml.
A sitemap is a list of the URLs on your site that you want search engines to know about. Its real job is discovery, not ranking. Google finds most pages by following links, so a sitemap adds most value where linking falls short: on new sites with few external links, on large sites where some pages sit many clicks deep, and on pages that are poorly linked internally. If a page is well linked from your navigation, listing it in a sitemap changes very little.
Two of the four available fields deserve less attention than they usually get. Google has stated plainly that it ignores priority and changefreq. Priority is a relative hint that every site owner sets to 1.0 for everything, which is precisely why it stopped being useful. Change frequency is treated as a claim rather than a fact, and Google determines recrawl intervals from observed change instead. Both remain valid parts of the sitemap protocol and other crawlers may read them, so there is no harm in including them — just do not expect them to influence anything at Google.
lastmod is the field that does still carry weight, but only if it is honest. Google uses it when it is consistently accurate and ignores it entirely on sites that stamp every URL with today’s date on every regeneration. A sitemap that claims the whole site changed this morning tells Google nothing except that the dates cannot be trusted.
What matters more than any of these is which URLs you include. A sitemap should list canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs and nothing else. Including redirects, 404s, noindexed pages, or non-canonical variants sends mixed signals: you are telling Google these pages matter while the pages themselves say otherwise. Search Console reports those conflicts as sitemap errors, and a sitemap full of them is worse than no sitemap.
Domain mode has a specific limitation worth understanding before you rely on it. It reads your homepage and collects the internal links on that one page. Anything not linked from the homepage — deeper category pages, older posts, anything reachable only through pagination — will not appear. For a small site with a full navigation menu that may cover everything; for anything larger, it is a starting point that needs supplementing.
The technical SEO side of the BigToolSite team tested this against manually prepared URL lists and live sites, checking the output against the sitemaps.org schema and confirming that only valid internal URLs are included and that the XML parses cleanly in Search Console.
Once your sitemap is live, declaring it in robots.txt helps crawlers find it without waiting for a manual submission, and the Robots.txt Generator writes that Sitemap line for you.
If a sitemap already exists and you want to confirm the declaration is being parsed correctly, the Robots.txt Tester flags malformed sitemap URLs.
To check a generated list against the pages you expected to see, the URL List Comparator shows what is missing from one list and extra in the other.
How to Use the Sitemap Generator
- Pick an input mode: List of URLs when you already know your pages, or Domain Name to extract links from your homepage automatically.
- For a list, paste URLs one per line, up to 500. Use full absolute URLs including the protocol, and include only pages you actually want indexed.
- For a domain, enter your homepage URL. The tool reads that page and collects the internal links on it.
- Set a Change Frequency. Choose something honest about how the section actually updates rather than defaulting to daily.
- Set a Priority between 0.1 and 1.0. If you use it at all, vary it meaningfully; setting everything to 1.0 conveys nothing.
- Click Generate Sitemap and review the output before saving.
- Use Copy XML or Download sitemap.xml, then upload it to your site root so it resolves at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
- Submit the URL in Google Search Console under Sitemaps, then check back in a few days for the processing report.
Example Usage
Input (Domain mode): https://example.com
Output (excerpt):
<url> <loc>https://example.com/about</loc> <lastmod>2026-07-14</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url>
Before uploading, scan the generated list for URLs that should not be there. Tag archives, paginated pages, filtered category variants, and internal search results are commonly linked from a homepage and rarely belong in a sitemap. Removing them is more valuable than any priority value you could assign.
For a site with distinct sections, several smaller sitemaps often work better than one large file. Generate one for posts, one for pages, one for products, and reference all of them from a sitemap index. Search Console then reports indexing coverage per file, which turns “some pages are not indexed” into “the product pages are not indexed” — a considerably more actionable finding.
After submission, the number that matters is discovered versus indexed. A gap between them is normal; a large gap means Google is choosing not to index pages it knows about, and that is a content or quality signal rather than a sitemap problem. Regenerating the sitemap will not fix it.
Frequently Asked Questions
It lists the URLs you want search engines to know about, helping them discover pages that internal linking alone might not surface. It aids discovery; it does not influence rankings.
To your site root, so it loads at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Then submit that URL in Google Search Console under the Sitemaps report.
No. It helps pages get found and crawled. Whether they rank depends on content, relevance, and links. A sitemap is a discovery mechanism, not a ranking factor.
Not at Google, which ignores both. They remain part of the sitemap protocol and other crawlers may use them, but neither will change how Google crawls or ranks your pages.
Yes, when it is accurate. Google uses it to prioritize recrawling genuinely updated pages, and ignores it on sites that stamp every URL with the current date on each regeneration.
Redirects, 404s, noindexed pages, non-canonical duplicates, paginated series, tag archives, and internal search results. A sitemap should list only canonical pages that return 200 and are meant to be indexed.
No. It reads only your homepage and collects the links on it, so anything not linked from there is missed. Use List of URLs mode for full coverage on larger sites.
The protocol allows 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed per file, whichever comes first. This tool handles up to 500 per generation. Larger sites split across multiple files referenced by a sitemap index.
Whenever pages are added or removed. Most CMS plugins do this automatically. For a manually generated sitemap, regenerate it after any meaningful change to your URL structure.
Not strictly, if every page is reachable within a couple of clicks from the homepage. It is still worth having, since it costs nothing and gives you the Search Console coverage report as a diagnostic.
Google found them and chose not to index them, usually because of thin or duplicate content, or crawl budget on large sites. That is a quality signal rather than a sitemap fault, and resubmitting will not change it.
Yes. The Sitemap line in robots.txt lets any crawler find it without a manual submission, and it costs one line.
