What a sitemap actually does
A sitemap is a structured XML file that lists the pages of your site you want a search engine to discover. Crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot can find pages by following links, but sitemaps speed up discovery for new sites, deep pages, and content that is not heavily interlinked. The format also lets you communicate metadata: when each page was last modified, how often it changes, and how important it is relative to other pages.
Submitting a sitemap is not a ranking signal, but it is one of the most reliable ways to make sure every page you care about is in the crawler queue.
How to use the generator
Paste one URL per line, choose a default change frequency (daily, weekly, monthly), set a priority value between 0.0 and 1.0, and decide whether to include the current date as the lastmod field. The tool emits a sitemap that conforms to the Sitemaps XML protocol 0.9 — the same format accepted by Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Yandex, and every other major crawler.
For larger sites, generate a single sitemap up to 50,000 URLs or split the output into multiple sitemaps and combine them with a sitemap index file.
Submitting your sitemap
- Upload the generated sitemap.xml to the root of your domain.
- Reference it from your robots.txt with a "Sitemap: https://yourdomain/sitemap.xml" line.
- In Google Search Console, open Sitemaps and submit the URL once.
- In Bing Webmaster Tools, submit it under Sitemaps.
- Re-submit after major content updates to accelerate re-crawling.