A sitemap is a list of URLs you hand to search engines so they don’t have to find every page by following links. It doesn’t rank pages, and it doesn’t make a bad page good — it just removes the excuse of “we never found it.” The generator above builds one by crawling your own site’s links from the homepage, the way a search engine would, which is why it works even when nothing else on the site produces a sitemap today.

What actually belongs in each entry

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/pricing</loc>
  <lastmod>2026-08-14</lastmod>
</url>

• <loc> — the full, absolute URL. Required.
• <lastmod> — the date the page last changed. The one optional field genuinely worth including, and only when it’s true: Google has said it will ignore lastmod values it doesn’t trust, such as one date stamped on every URL in the file. The generator only writes it when the page’s own Last-Modified response header is present — never a guess.
• <priority> and <changefreq> — deliberately left out. Google confirmed in 2020 that it ignores both; they were always a hint, never a directive, and in practice everyone set priority to 0.8 and changed nothing about how often their pages actually changed. Leaving them out isn’t a shortcut, it’s accuracy.

How the generator finds your pages

1. It reads robots.txt first, so it never lists a URL your own rules disallow for crawlers.
2. It fetches the homepage, follows internal links breadth-first, and keeps going — skipping assets, tag/author/cart/login archives, and anything with a query string — up to 200 pages.
3. For each page it keeps, it checks the real Last-Modified header rather than inventing a date.

Two hundred pages is a deliberate ceiling for a free, no-sign-up tool: enough for the overwhelming majority of small and mid-sized sites, and honest about where it stops rather than silently truncating a much larger site without saying so.

Size limits, and when to split

A single sitemap file is capped at 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed. Past that, split into multiple files and list them in a sitemap index file — a small XML file whose only job is to point at your other sitemaps. Sites with that many URLs are also usually past the point where a link-crawling generator like this one is the right tool; a sitemap exported directly from the CMS or database is more reliable at that scale.

Submitting it

1. Upload the file to your site’s root so it answers at /sitemap.xml.
2. Add a line to robots.txt: Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml — the robots.txt generator does this automatically.
3. Submit the URL in Google Search Console under Sitemaps, and again in Bing Webmaster Tools if you track Bing separately.
4. Confirm both files agree with the robots.txt & sitemap checker.

Frequently asked

Does being in the sitemap mean a page will rank?

No. It means Google knows the page exists. Whether it gets crawled, indexed, and ranked depends on the page itself and the links pointing to it — a sitemap only removes discovery as the bottleneck.

Should I include noindexed pages?

No. Listing a page you’ve told search engines not to index is a contradictory signal; leave it out of the sitemap the same way you’d leave it out of navigation.

How often should I regenerate it?

Whenever you add or remove pages in a way that matters — a new product line, a restructured blog. For a site that changes constantly, serving the sitemap from a route that queries your database directly is more accurate than a periodically-regenerated static file.

Why did some of my pages not show up?

Either robots.txt disallows them, they aren’t linked from anywhere the crawl reached, or the 200-page cap was hit first. The result above tells you which.