Sitemap.xml Generator — From URL List, Online, Free

A sitemap is a discovery hint, not an instruction

Search engines treat a sitemap as a list of URLs you would like them to know about — genuinely useful for a large site, for newly published pages, and for anything poorly linked from your own navigation.

What it does not do is any of the things people hope. It does not make a page rank, does not guarantee indexing, and does not force a recrawl. A URL that is thin, duplicated, blocked by robots.txt, carrying noindex, or returning anything other than 200 will not be indexed, and listing it in a sitemap changes none of that. The sitemap answers "does this URL exist?", never "is this URL worth having?"

Of the four fields, one is used

Most sitemap advice online is a decade out of date, so it is worth being specific about what each field actually achieves.

• <loc> — required. Must be absolute, on the same host, and the canonical version of the URL.
• <lastmod> — the one field Google genuinely uses, and only while it stays trustworthy. This is the important caveat: a site that stamps every URL with today's date teaches crawlers that its dates mean nothing, and the field is then discounted for that site entirely. A dishonest lastmod is worse than none, because it spends the only signal you had. In this tool lastmod is therefore off by default — turn it on only if the URLs you are listing really were modified today.
• <changefreq> — ignored by Google. It was always a hint about how often a page might change, never a request.
• <priority> — ignored by Google, and the most widely misunderstood field in the format. It is not a ranking lever and never was; it only ever expressed relative importance within your own sitemap. Setting everything to 1.0 achieves precisely nothing.

The hard limits

A single sitemap file may contain at most 50,000 URLs and must not exceed 50 MB uncompressed. Hit either ceiling and you split into multiple files, then reference them all from a sitemap index — a small XML file that lists sitemaps instead of URLs. Files may be gzipped, and the 50 MB limit applies to the uncompressed size.

Rules that actually matter

Include only canonical, indexable URLs that return 200. Leave out anything blocked in robots.txt, anything carrying noindex, redirects, and parameter variants that duplicate a canonical page.

This is worth taking seriously rather than treating as tidiness: a sitemap stuffed with non-indexable URLs is itself a quality signal, and a bad one. You are asserting that these are the pages worth crawling, so a list where half the entries redirect or 404 tells a search engine your assertions are unreliable. Keeping it in sync with the site matters more than making it exhaustive.

Submitting it

Two steps, and they are complementary rather than alternatives. Reference the file from robots.txt with a Sitemap: directive, which every crawler reads — the robots.txt generator will add that line for you. Then submit it in Google Search Console, which additionally gives you a report of how many of the submitted URLs were actually indexed. That gap between submitted and indexed is the genuinely useful output of the whole exercise.