XML Sitemap Generator

How to use XML Sitemap Generator

1. Paste your URLs, one per line. A full crawl export or a CMS URL list works directly.
2. Set the defaults for lastmod, changefreq and priority, or add per-URL values.
3. Download sitemap.xml and upload it to your site root, then submit it in Search Console.

What a sitemap does — and what it does not

A sitemap is a discovery aid. It tells search engines which URLs exist and when they last changed. That is the whole of it.

It does not make pages rank. It does not guarantee indexing — Google indexes what it judges worth indexing, and a sitemap entry is a suggestion. It does not fix thin content, duplicate content or a page blocked by robots.txt.

Where it genuinely helps: large sites where crawl budget matters, new sites with few inbound links, pages that are deep in the structure or poorly linked internally, and any site that publishes frequently. Where it helps least: a well-linked 20-page site, which Google will find perfectly well on its own.

The one thing it reliably gives you is reporting. Search Console shows indexed versus submitted per sitemap, which is how you find out that 400 of your 500 pages were never indexed — information you do not otherwise get.

The rules a sitemap has to follow

• 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file. Past either, split into multiple files under a sitemap index. This tool does that automatically.
• Absolute URLs only, including the protocol. Relative paths are invalid.
• Only canonical URLs. Never list a URL that canonicalises elsewhere, is redirected, returns a 404, or is blocked by robots.txt. Each of those is a conflicting signal.
• Same host as the sitemap, unless you have verified cross-submission in Search Console.
• UTF-8 encoded, with XML entities escaped. An ampersand in a query string must be &.
• lastmod must be truthful. Google has said explicitly that it ignores lastmod on sites where the value is obviously unreliable — setting every page to today defeats the purpose.

changefreq and priority barely matter

Worth saying plainly, because a lot of tools present them as important.

Google has stated it ignores changefreq entirely, and treats priority as close to meaningless — priority is relative within your own site, so setting everything to 1.0 conveys nothing. Bing pays them slightly more attention but not much.

lastmod is the one Google confirmed it does use, provided it is consistently accurate. That means it should reflect a genuine content change, not a template tweak or a build timestamp.

They are included here because the specification allows them and some crawlers read them. Setting sensible values costs nothing; agonising over them is wasted effort that would be better spent on internal linking.

After you generate it

1. Upload to the site root — /sitemap.xml. It can live elsewhere, but the root is conventional and simplest.
2. Reference it in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line. Every major crawler reads that, including ones you have not registered with.
3. Submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing is worth doing — it feeds ChatGPT’s search index as well as Bing itself.
4. Ping IndexNow on publish. It is free, takes one HTTP request, and notifies Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver immediately rather than waiting for a crawl.
5. Check coverage after two weeks. The submitted-versus-indexed gap in Search Console is the most useful diagnostic a new site has.

Frequently asked questions