Sitemap.xml generator

What an XML sitemap is for

A sitemap is a discovery aid: it hands search engines a clean list of the URLs you want crawled, which matters most for large sites, brand-new sites with few backlinks, and pages buried deep in your link structure. It does not guarantee indexing and it doesn't boost rankings — being listed is an invitation to crawl, not a promise to rank. This generator produces a standards-compliant <urlset> with one <url> entry per line you paste; lines that aren't valid absolute URLs are skipped, and the counter shows how many made it in. List only canonical, indexable URLs — including redirects, noindex pages or duplicates sends mixed signals and wastes crawl budget.

lastmod, changefreq and priority — what Google really uses

Of the three optional hints, only lastmod carries real weight — and only when it's honest. Google uses an accurate last-modified date to prioritise re-crawling pages that have actually changed; sites that stamp every URL with today's date quickly teach Google to ignore the field entirely. Google has stated plainly that it ignores changefreq and priority. They remain valid parts of the protocol (Bing and other engines may still read them) and are harmless to include, but don't expect them to move anything in Google. The safe default is an accurate lastmod and nothing else.

Limits, hosting and submitting

A single sitemap file is capped at 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed, whichever comes first. Past that, split into several files and reference them from a sitemap index file. Save the output as sitemap.xml, upload it to your site (the root is conventional), add a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt so engines can find it automatically, and submit the URL in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Keep it current as you add or remove pages — a stale sitemap full of 404s erodes the trust that makes the file useful in the first place.