Free XML Sitemap Generator
Paste your page URLs, one per line, and get a valid sitemap.xml ready to upload.
sitemap.xml
What a sitemap is actually for
A sitemap exists to solve a discovery problem, not a ranking one: search engines primarily find pages by following links from page to page, and a sitemap fills in the gaps where that link-following naturally falls short — pages several clicks deep in a site's structure, pages with few or no internal links pointing to them, or content on a site too new to have accumulated many inbound links yet. Listing a URL in a sitemap is a hint that says "this page exists and here's roughly how important and how fresh it is" — it is not a guarantee. Search engines still independently decide whether to actually crawl and index each listed URL based on its own quality and relevance signals, which is exactly why the priority and changefreq fields are treated as advisory rather than binding, as the FAQ below covers.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many URLs can one sitemap hold?
Up to 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed, per the sitemap protocol. Sites larger than that split into multiple sitemap files listed in a sitemap index file.
What does priority actually do?
Very little in practice. Google has said for years that it largely ignores the priority value, treating it as a weak hint at most. Include it for completeness, but don't expect it to meaningfully influence crawling or rankings.
What's changefreq for?
It's a hint about how often a page's content changes (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.), meant to help crawlers prioritize revisits. Like priority, search engines treat it as advisory rather than a strict schedule.
Where do I upload the sitemap once it's generated?
Upload sitemap.xml to your site's root (https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml), then reference it in your robots.txt and submit it directly in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools for faster discovery.
Does listing a page in the sitemap guarantee it gets indexed?
No — a sitemap only helps a search engine discover that a URL exists. Whether it actually gets crawled and indexed still depends on the page's own quality and relevance, entirely independent of the sitemap entry.
Why include a page that's already linked from the homepage?
Well-linked pages benefit least from a sitemap, since crawlers can already find them by following links. A sitemap matters most for pages that are hard to discover that way — buried deep in a site's structure or with few internal links pointing to them — but including everything is harmless and simpler than curating a subset.