Free XML sitemap generator
Generate sitemap XML for a small site in one step. The generator crawls up to 50 pages from your homepage and builds a sitemap of the pages worth listing: the ones that return 200, aren't noindex and are their own canonical.
Up to 10 checks a minute. Pages are fetched from IndexCyborg's servers; private and local addresses are refused.
How the sitemap generator works
It starts at the address your homepage really lives at (after any redirect from http or to www), follows <a href> links on the same host, and fetches up to 50 pages, honoring your robots.txt. Every page fetched ends up in one of two lists:
| Listed in the sitemap | Left out, with the reason |
|---|---|
| HTTP 200, HTML | Redirects, errors, files that aren't HTML |
| No noindex in meta robots or X-Robots-Tag | noindex pages |
| Canonical to itself, or no canonical | Pages whose canonical points elsewhere (the target is crawled instead) |
| Open to Googlebot in robots.txt | URLs robots.txt disallows |
The output is a standard <urlset> file in UTF-8 with the sitemaps.org namespace, ready to download. It has no <lastmod>, <changefreq> or <priority>: Google ignores the last two and trusts lastmod only when it's accurate.
After you create the sitemap
- Upload it as
/sitemap.xmlat your site's root, so it can cover every URL on the host. - Add
Sitemap: https://your-domain/sitemap.xmlto robots.txt (sitemap in robots.txt). - Submit it in Search Console (submit a sitemap to Google).
- Run it through the sitemap checker to confirm it validates.
When to build the sitemap elsewhere
A generated file is a snapshot: it goes stale the next time you publish. Most CMSs and frameworks build and update a sitemap for you, and that's the better choice for any site that changes often or has more than a few dozen pages. See how to create an XML sitemap for WordPress, Next.js, Astro and others, and the XML sitemap guide for the format.
How IndexCyborg handles this
Once a sitemap exists, IndexCyborg keeps reading it: every 24 hours by default (adjustable from 1 to 168), it detects new, changed and removed URLs, checks them, sends them to IndexNow after you verify the domain, and asks Google about each one through Search Console.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I create an XML sitemap for Google?
- Generate it here for a small site, or let your CMS or framework build it. Upload sitemap.xml to your site's root, add a Sitemap: line to robots.txt and submit it in Search Console.
- Is this XML sitemap generator free?
- Yes, with no account. Each run crawls up to 50 pages. For a larger site, use your CMS or framework's sitemap, which can list every page and update itself.
- Why doesn't the generated sitemap include lastmod?
- A crawl can't tell when each page last changed, and Google only uses lastmod when it's consistently accurate. A sitemap built by your CMS can set real dates.
- Will a sitemap get my pages indexed?
- It helps search engines discover them. Google still decides what to crawl and index, so check each page's status in Search Console after you submit.