Sitemap URL Extractor

Crawlers guess, sitemaps declare. A web crawler infers your site's URL list by following links, which means it misses orphan pages, picks up junk URLs that no canonical points to, and respects robots.txt rules that hide what you actually want to inventory. A sitemap.xml is the URL list as the site owner intended it — the pages they want indexed, with metadata about freshness and priority baked in.

That's why content audits, search-console submissions, AI training corpus assembly, and migration plans all start with the sitemap rather than the crawl. The extractor below flattens the XML into a plain list you can paste into anything: a spreadsheet, an HTTP status checker, a content brief, an internal slide. Sitemap indexes — the parent files that group multiple sitemaps — are followed automatically so you never have to chase nested URLs by hand.

loc is the URL. It's the only required field and the one this tool exports.

lastmod is the page's last meaningful update date. Google uses it as a hint to prioritise recrawls, so populating it accurately accelerates indexation of fresh content. Sites that set lastmod to "today" on every page sabotage their own credibility — Google learns to ignore the field.

changefreq and priority are largely ignored by modern crawlers. Don't waste time tuning them; the URL list and accurate lastmod values are what matter.

Quarterly URL audits. Extract the sitemap, diff it against the previous quarter, and you have a precise list of pages added, removed or renamed. Surface stale URLs that should be unpublished or redirected.

Migration planning. Before a domain change or platform swap, the sitemap is the canonical list of redirects you need to author. Export, map old to new, ship as a 301 list.

Index gap analysis. Cross-reference the sitemap with Google Search Console's indexed-pages report. Anything in the sitemap but not indexed is a coverage issue worth diagnosing.

Section health checks. Filter the URL list by directory and you can spot under-published categories that need editorial investment or over-thin categories that should be consolidated.