A sitemap gives search engines a clean list of the pages you want found. The XML Sitemap Generator builds sitemap.xml from a crawl of your site, an existing sitemap or a list of URLs you paste. It suits a business site before launch, a blog after a domain move, or a messy sitemap that lists redirects and noindex pages and needs rebuilding.
Three ways to build one list.
In Crawl from URL, enter your homepage, set Max pages up to 200 and press Crawl site. The crawler follows internal links, starts from your existing sitemap if it finds one, and skips paths robots.txt blocks for all crawlers. Tick the pages you want and click Add to sitemap.
Import a sitemap pulls up to 5,000 URLs from an existing sitemap or sitemap index, which suits larger sites. Paste URLs takes full URLs, one per line. Every source adds to the same list, duplicates are skipped, and characters such as & are escaped so the XML stays valid.
Scan, filter, review.
A crawl lists every page it could fetch, including ones that do not belong in a sitemap. Press Scan pages and the tool reads each page's robots meta, canonical, images and hreflang links. With Leave out pages marked noindex and Leave out pages whose canonical points to another URL ticked, those pages drop out of the file.
Exclude URLs containing takes patterns, one per line, with * wildcards, which is handy for tag archives or filtered URLs. Redirects are not detected, so check the finished file with the XML Sitemap Validator.
Which tags matter.
By default, lastmod uses a date found on the page, such as the article:modified_time or og:updated_time meta tag, and today's date when there is none. You can also use today for every URL, set one date, leave lastmod out, or edit any row in the table. Google only trusts lastmod when it matches real changes, so correct wrong dates.
Google has said it ignores changefreq and priority, though other search engines may still read them. Set either to Leave out for a leaner file. Priority can also step down by page depth, from 1.0 for the homepage to 0.8, 0.64 and lower for deeper pages.
After you download.
There is no official Google sitemap generator; Google expects you to host the file. Upload sitemap.xml to your root so it loads at https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, submit that URL under Sitemaps in Google Search Console, and add a Sitemap line to robots.txt so other crawlers find it.
A sitemap helps Google find pages. It does not force indexing, which still depends on quality, duplication and internal links.
What the file can and cannot cover.
One sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Past that, the tool splits the list into numbered files plus a sitemap index and downloads them as a ZIP; you can also set a smaller number of URLs per file. Besides .xml, you can download a gzipped .xml.gz or a plain text sitemap.
After a scan, the file can carry image:image entries and xhtml:link hreflang alternates, with the namespaces added for you. Video and news sitemaps are not covered. To see an existing sitemap's structure as a diagram, use the Sitemap Visualizer. For a page that visitors can browse, the HTML Sitemap Generator builds one from the same URL list.
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