Sitemap URL Extractor

An XML sitemap is a file a website publishes for search engines. It lists the pages the site wants crawled, wrapped in XML tags that are easy for Googlebot to read and awkward for a person to work with. Open one in a browser and you'll see hundreds of <url> and <loc> tags, and if it's a sitemap index you'll see nothing but links to more sitemaps. This tool strips all of that away and hands you the plain list of page addresses.

That list turns out to be useful far more often than you'd expect:

• Site audits: feed every URL into a crawler, a bulk status checker, or a meta tag checker instead of hoping the crawler finds them all by following links.
• Migrations and redesigns: export the full list of old URLs before launch so you can map each one to a redirect and check nothing was left behind.
• Competitor research: see every page a competitor has published, how their site is organized by folder, and which sections they update most, all from a file they publish on purpose.
• Content inventories: a sitemap is usually the quickest way to get a complete page list for a content audit or pruning project.
• Debugging your own sitemap: spot pages that shouldn't be in it, pages that are missing, stale lastmod dates, and duplicate entries.

Because sitemaps are capped at 50,000 URLs each, bigger sites split theirs into a sitemap index that points to several child sitemaps. The tool follows those automatically, so you get one combined list no matter how the site has divided things up.

The easiest way is to let this tool look. Type just the domain, like example.com, and it reads the site's robots.txt file, which is where sites are supposed to announce their sitemap with a Sitemap: line. If there's no line there, it tries the common locations one after another.

If you'd rather find it yourself, try these addresses in order:

• /sitemap.xml is the default for most sites and the first thing search engines check.
• /sitemap_index.xml is what Yoast and Rank Math create on WordPress sites, with separate child sitemaps for posts, pages, and categories.
• /wp-sitemap.xml is WordPress's built-in sitemap when no SEO plugin has replaced it.
• /sitemap.xml also works on Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, and Webflow, which all generate one automatically.
• /sitemap.xml.gz is the compressed version some larger sites and e-commerce platforms serve instead.

If none of those work, the site may have given its sitemap an unusual name and only told Google about it inside Search Console. In that case there's no public way to find it, though a Google search for site:example.com filetype:xml occasionally turns one up. Some sites genuinely don't have a sitemap at all, which is worth knowing if the site is yours. Our XML Sitemap Generator can build one from a list of URLs.

Because a sitemap is a list of what the site owner wants indexed, not a list of everything that exists. A well-configured sitemap deliberately leaves out pages tagged noindex, paginated archives, internal search results, thank-you pages, and anything behind a login. So a 2,000-page site with a 600-URL sitemap may be perfectly healthy.

The reverse is more worrying. A sitemap that includes redirected URLs, 404s, draft pages, or thousands of tag and author archives is sending Google to pages it shouldn't be spending time on. If you're checking your own site and the count looks too high, scan the folder breakdown below the results. A folder like /tag/ with hundreds of entries is usually the culprit, and most SEO plugins let you exclude that content type in a couple of clicks.

Two other things change the count. If "Follow sitemap indexes" is off, you'll only see the child sitemap addresses rather than the pages inside them. And the same page can appear in two child sitemaps, which is why duplicate removal is on by default: with it off, the raw count includes repeats.

They're optional extras a sitemap can attach to each URL, and only one of them still matters:

• lastmod is the date the page last changed. Google does use it, as long as it's accurate, to decide which pages to recrawl. Sites that stamp every URL with today's date, or with the time the sitemap was generated, train Google to ignore the field entirely. If every lastmod in the results is identical, that's what's happening.
• changefreq was meant to hint how often a page changes (daily, weekly, and so on). Google has said for years that it ignores it, and Bing treats it as a weak hint at best.
• priority is a number from 0.0 to 1.0 meant to rank pages against each other on the same site. Google ignores this one too. Many plugins still emit it, which is why you'll see columns full of 0.8 and 0.6 that don't affect anything.

For your own site, keep lastmod honest and don't worry about the other two. When you're looking at someone else's sitemap, the lastmod column is the interesting one: sort by newest and you can see which sections of a competitor's site are being actively updated, and which have been gathering dust for years.

Yes. A sitemap is a public file that a site publishes specifically so that other machines will read it, and reading it is exactly what Google, Bing, and every SEO crawler on the market do all day. You're seeing nothing the site hasn't chosen to list. What you do with the list is where ordinary good judgement applies: use it to understand how a competitor structures their content and where the gaps in your own coverage are, not to scrape their pages wholesale or copy their articles.

A useful workflow is to extract the competitor's URLs, filter to the folder you care about, such as /blog/, and compare it against your own list to find topics they cover that you don't. The slugs alone usually tell you what each page is about. The Keyword Cannibalization Checker can then tell you whether you already have pages competing for those topics.

It depends on which option you use. When you paste XML or open a file from your computer, everything happens inside your browser: the file is never uploaded and nothing is sent to us. When you enter a sitemap address, our server has to fetch the file for you, because browsers don't allow a page on one site to read files from another. The server downloads the sitemap, pulls out the list of URLs, and sends only that list back. It doesn't keep the file, and a short-lived copy of the parsed list is cached for a few minutes so repeat requests don't hit the same site twice. The results, filters, and exports are all generated on your device, and clicking away from the page clears them.