Sitemap Generator

How to use Sitemap Generator

1. Paste your page URLs into URLs, one per line, or open or drop a text file. After each URL you can add a date (YYYY-MM-DD), a priority (0.0–1.0) and a changefreq such as weekly, in any order. Turn on Find URLs in text to pull every http(s) URL out of any text instead.
2. Optionally set default lastmod, changefreq and priority values; they apply to every URL that doesn’t set its own.
3. Check the notices for lines that were skipped, duplicates that were removed and URLs from more than one host.
4. Copy or download sitemap.xml. For very large lists, download each sitemap-N.xml file and the sitemap-index.xml, after setting Where the files will live.
5. To check an existing file, switch to Validate a sitemap and paste or open the XML.

How it works

Each line is checked with the browser’s URL parser: only absolute http and https URLs are accepted, #fragments are dropped, and the URL is written in its normalised form (for example non-ASCII characters are percent-encoded). Exact duplicates are removed. The output is a UTF-8 <urlset> in the sitemaps.org 0.9 namespace, with &, <, >, " and ' escaped.

A single sitemap may hold at most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. When your list exceeds either limit, it is split into sitemap-1.xml, sitemap-2.xml and so on, and a sitemap-index.xml is written that points to each file under the base URL you give (by default the origin of the first URL), with today’s date as lastmod.

The validator uses a small built-in XML parser that checks well-formedness and reports the line of the first error. It then checks for a <urlset> or <sitemapindex> root with the right namespace, a valid <loc> in every entry, duplicates, W3C-format lastmod dates, valid changefreq and priority values, URLs from several hosts, and the 50,000-entry and 50 MB limits.

Limits

• Only absolute http(s) URLs. Relative paths such as /about are reported and skipped.
• Only the core sitemap tags are written. Image, video and news extensions and hreflang alternates (xhtml:link) are not generated; in the validator, prefixed extension elements are accepted but not checked.
• The validator rejects DOCTYPE declarations and does not validate against the XSD schema. Gzipped .xml.gz sitemaps must be decompressed first.
• In the validator, at most 200 issues are listed. In the generator, the first 20 skipped lines are listed individually.
• Duplicates are found by exact URL after normalisation; URLs that differ only in a trailing slash or query order count as different pages.

Privacy

Generating and validating run entirely in your browser. URLs and XML are never uploaded or stored, and the site’s Content Security Policy blocks requests to other servers. If you use Send to… to open the output in another tool, it is handed over through this tab’s session storage and removed as soon as that tool reads it.

Frequently asked questions

Do changefreq and priority matter?

Google ignores both. It does use lastmod when it is consistently accurate, so set it to the date a page’s content really changed rather than today’s date for every page.

Can I include URLs from another domain?

Normally no. A sitemap should list only URLs on the host it is served from. Cross-host sitemaps work only when you have verified ownership of both sites, for example in Search Console, so the tool warns when URLs span several hosts.

What happens with more than 50,000 URLs?

The list is split into several sitemap files of up to 50,000 URLs (and 50 MB) each, plus a sitemap index that lists them. Upload all files to the location you entered and submit just the index.

How do search engines find my sitemap?

Submit it in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, and add a Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml line to your robots.txt so other crawlers find it too.

Why are ampersands changed to &?

Sitemaps are XML, where a bare & is invalid. Escaping it as & keeps the file well-formed; crawlers read it back as &, so the URL is unchanged.