Crawlie
Home Free tools Site audit Blog About Contact
Run free audit
February 5, 2026

# What Is Sitemap Generator? A Practical Guide to XML Sitemap

A sitemap doesn't get your pages ranked — it just makes sure Google knows they exist. Plenty of sites still submit a sitemap once and never look at it again, which is how orphaned or deleted pages linger in it for years.

Sitemap Generator exists to solve one specific, recurring problem: XML sitemap is easy to get wrong by hand, tedious to check manually across a whole site, and quick to fix once you can actually see it clearly. That's the gap Sitemap Generator fills.

In practice, this usually comes up in one of two situations — you're setting things up correctly from the start on a new page or site, or you're auditing something that already exists and trying to find what's silently broken. Both are worth doing regularly, not just once.

A few things worth keeping in mind:
- List only canonical, indexable URLs — a sitemap full of redirects, 404s, or noindex pages actively wastes crawl budget and can make Search Console flag your sitemap as low quality.
- Keep it under 50,000 URLs per file (Google's hard limit); split larger sites into multiple sitemaps referenced by a sitemap index file.
- Update it every time you publish, unpublish, or permanently remove a page — a stale sitemap is worse than no sitemap because it actively misleads crawlers.

It's also worth knowing what commonly goes wrong here. Including URLs that are blocked by robots.txt — Google can't reconcile 'crawl this' with 'don't crawl this' and will just ignore the entry. And avoiding these is usually less about effort and more about knowing to check in the first place.

This connects to a few other things worth getting right at the same time — see Backlink Checker and Meta Tag Generator for the related pieces of the same technical foundation.

If you want to check this on your own site right now, Sitemap Generator runs directly in your browser, free, with no account required.

Try Sitemap Generator yourself

Everything in this guide runs directly in your browser — no signup, no install.

Open Sitemap Generator →
More on XML sitemap
Sitemap Generator vs. Doing It by Hand: Is It Worth Switching?
A practical look at what Sitemap Generator actually saves you over doing XML sitemap manually, and when manual still makes sense.
The XML Sitemap Checklist: What to Verify Before You Publish
A short, practical checklist for XML sitemap — the things worth checking every time, not just the first time.
XML Sitemap FAQ: Questions People Actually Ask
Straight answers to the questions that come up most often about XML sitemap.
Audits & reports▸
Full SEO audit Competitor comparison
Technical SEO▸
Bulk URL indexability checker Robots.txt generator Sitemap generator Schema generator Redirect checker Broken link checker Backlink checker Image URL checker Internal link suggestion tool Keyword cannibalization checker Search intent cluster tool eCommerce keyword research tool Programmatic SEO page generator
Product & e-commerce feeds▸
Multi-channel feed generator Google Merchant feed generator Facebook product feed generator Pinterest product feed generator Google product category finder Competitor product research Merchant feed validator GTIN / EAN / UPC validator Product title optimizer SEO product description generator Slug generator Keyword density
Content & AI search▸
AI crawler &amp; llms.txt checker Readability counter Blog topic generator Google Discover headline generator AI Overview optimizer GEO checker Featured snippet optimizer Topical coverage calculator Meta tag generator
Sharing & distribution▸
SERP preview Open Graph preview UTM builder WhatsApp link generator RSS feed generator
No tools match your search.