Sitemap Generator

Search engines have gotten much better at crawling, but a sitemap is still the single highest-leverage SEO asset a site can publish. It explicitly tells Google, Bing and a growing list of AI crawlers which URLs you consider canonical, when they were last meaningfully updated, and how to discover deep pages that internal linking alone might bury. For sites larger than a few dozen pages, the gap between "in the sitemap" and "not in the sitemap" routinely correlates with whether a page gets indexed at all.

Modern publishers also feed sitemaps to non-Google consumers: Bing Webmaster Tools, Yandex, IndexNow, and the new wave of LLM training corpus crawlers. A single well-formed sitemap.xml is the universal input format. Generating one with a crawler — rather than maintaining it by hand or relying on a flaky CMS plugin — guarantees it stays in sync with what's actually reachable on the live site.

The crawler starts at the homepage, requests it, parses every internal link, queues the new URLs, and repeats — breadth-first — until it has either covered the site or hit the page limit. Disallowed paths in robots.txt are skipped. Duplicate URLs collapse on first sight. The output is a sitemap that contains only pages your own internal linking actually points at, which is exactly the set you want indexed.

Hidden benefit: any page that should be public but doesn't show up in the crawl is an orphan. Spotting orphan pages is one of the easiest SEO wins a site can claim — fix the internal linking and the page starts ranking. The crawl-based sitemap surfaces these gaps as a side effect of generation.

Upload to your domain root. The conventional path is /sitemap.xml. Search engines look there first.

Reference it from robots.txt. Add Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml on its own line. Every major crawler honours this directive.

Submit to Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Submission triggers a faster initial fetch and gives you a coverage report. Resubmit after major content changes.

Regenerate on a schedule. Monthly is enough for most sites. High-velocity publishers — news, e-commerce, large blogs — should regenerate weekly or after every meaningful publishing batch.

Split very large sitemaps. The protocol caps a single file at 50,000 URLs or 50 MB. Beyond that, use a sitemap index pointing at multiple child sitemaps grouped by section.