Ship a crawler-friendly sitemap in minutes
A lean XML sitemap keeps Googlebot, Bingbot, and every other crawler focused on the pages that matter. The generator trims duplicate URLs, strips tracking parameters when you want, and records lastmod
dates from theLast-Modified
header whenever it exists so search engines know what changed and when.
Run separate crawls for large sites, then zip them up in an index file. Each sitemap can cover up to 50,000 URLs, but in practice you'll get fresher results by splitting high-change sections—blog, docs, product—into their own files and regenerating them as content lands.
Best practices baked in
- De-duplicate smarter: Skip query strings to collapse pagination and UTM variants. If you do need a canonical query URL, enable the toggle and it stays in the feed.
- Keep
lastmod
honest: We auto-fill headers when the server exposes them. Missing dates? Fill them in bulk with today's stamp, or set a fallback date for a whole crawl so Google sees timely updates. - Serve it fast: After uploading
sitemap.xml
, also host a gzipped copy at/sitemap.xml.gz
. Most crawlers request the compressed version first, saving bandwidth and speeding discovery. - Point robots.txt at it: Update your robots rules to include
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
so even restricted bots can discover it. Need help? Spin up the Robots.txt Generator for a compliant template.
Submit to Google Search Console
- Log in to Google Search Console and select the property you manage.
- Open the Sitemaps tab in the left navigation.
- Enter the relative path to your sitemap—for example
sitemap.xml
or blog/sitemap.xml
. - Click Submit. Google will fetch the file immediately and queue the crawl.
- Refresh the page to confirm the status. GSC reports discovery count, last read date, and any parsing errors so you can fix issues fast.
Also drop a link in Bing Webmaster Tools for broader coverage, and share the sitemap path with teammates maintaining the CMS so they can regenerate whenever new sections go live.
Need more on-page polish?
Pair this sitemap with refreshed SERP snippets and metadata so your crawled URLs actually win the click. Test titles and descriptions in the SERP Snippet Preview and tune messaging with the Meta Description Generator.