XML Sitemap Generator

About the XML Sitemap Generator

Search engines can usually find pages by following links, but a sitemap makes discovery explicit and gives a way to hint at how often a page tends to change. Paste in a list of URLs, one per line, and this tool builds a valid, properly escaped sitemap following the sitemaps.org schema, applying the chosen change frequency, priority, and optional last-modified date across every entry, with special characters like ampersands in a URL escaped automatically so the output is always valid XML.

Which of these fields Google actually uses

Google has stated plainly that it ignores <priority> and <changefreq> for crawling decisions, it crawls based on its own signals rather than a number a site owner assigns itself, which makes sense once you consider every site would rate its own homepage a 1.0 if the field actually mattered. <lastmod> is the one field Google does pay attention to, but only when it's accurate, a lastmod date that's clearly wrong or updated on every single page regardless of whether anything changed gets learned as unreliable and starts being ignored for that domain specifically. This tool applies one lastmod date, today's, across every URL by default, which is fine for a first sitemap covering pages that genuinely were just published or reviewed, but isn't a substitute for tracking real per-page modification dates on a site that updates content at different times.

The size limits sitemaps actually have

A single sitemap file is capped at 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed by the sitemap protocol, a limit unlikely to matter for most sites but relevant for anything with a large catalog or archive. Past that point, the standard approach is splitting URLs across multiple sitemap files and listing them all in a single sitemap index file, which most CMS platforms and static site generators handle automatically once a site grows past the threshold.

What "skipped" means in the output

Lines that don't look like a URL, no dot and no obvious structure, are counted as skipped rather than silently dropped or inserted as broken entries, which is a useful check when pasting in a list scraped or exported from somewhere else, a stray blank line or a copy-paste artifact shows up in that count instead of quietly corrupting the generated XML.

After the sitemap is generated

A finished sitemap needs to actually be discoverable to do any good. Uploading it to a site's root and referencing it from robots.txt with a Sitemap: line is the standard approach, and submitting the same URL directly through Google Search Console gives a faster, more direct signal than waiting for a crawler to find the reference on its own. The Robots.txt Generator on this site adds that Sitemap line automatically when a sitemap URL is provided, so the two tools are usually used one right after the other.

Where the URLs in this list come from

This tool doesn't crawl a site to discover URLs on its own, the list has to be assembled and pasted in manually, from a CMS export, a hand-written list of key pages, or a URL list pulled from server logs or an existing sitemap. For a small site with a stable, well-known set of pages, that's usually faster than setting up an automated crawl just to regenerate the same handful of URLs, and it avoids accidentally including a URL that shouldn't be indexed, since nothing gets added unless it was deliberately typed or pasted in.