sitemap finder.

A sitemap is a file, almost always XML, that lists the pages on your site you want search engines to know about. It does not force anything to be crawled or indexed - think of it as a suggested reading list, not an instruction. Its real job is discovery: it helps crawlers find pages they might otherwise miss, and it can carry hints like when each page last changed. On a small, tidy site Google will usually find everything anyway; a sitemap earns its keep when a site is large, new, or not well connected by internal links.

Honestly? Not every site strictly does. Google crawls a small, well-linked site perfectly well without one. But a sitemap helps, and rarely hurts, in the cases that trip most sites up: the site is large, it is new with few links pointing at it, some pages are orphaned because nothing links to them, or the content changes often. It is also the cleanest way to hand Search Console the list of pages you actually want crawled. For most sites it is a low-effort, low-risk win, which is why it is worth making sure yours exists and can be found.

Most sites keep it at /sitemap.xml, and that is the first place to look. But not everyone does. WordPress core serves /wp-sitemap.xml, plenty of plugins and platforms use /sitemap_index.xml or /sitemap-index.xml, and some tuck it in a folder like /sitemap/. The reliable pointer is a Sitemap: line in your robots.txt, but that only helps if you remembered to add one. This tool checks robots.txt first, then probes the common locations so you do not have to guess.

A sitemap can be one of two things. A url set is a flat list of the actual page URLs on your site. A sitemap index does not list pages at all; it lists other sitemaps, so it is a table of contents that points at child sitemaps (large sites split their URLs across several files, because a single sitemap caps at 50,000 URLs). Both are valid to submit to Google. This tool tells you which one it found so you know whether you are looking at the whole picture or just the index.

Submit it in Google Search Console. Open the Sitemaps report for your property, paste the sitemap URL, and hit submit. That tells Google where to find the full list of pages you want crawled, and the same report then shows how many it read and when it last fetched them. While you are at it, add a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt so any crawler can find it automatically, without you having to submit it anywhere.

A site with no robots.txt still gets crawled (no file means "crawl everything"), so it is not fatal. But robots.txt is the one place every crawler knows to look for a Sitemap: pointer, and without it your sitemap is only discoverable if a crawler happens to guess the right path or you submit it by hand. It is a two-minute fix that makes your sitemap findable, so this tool flags when the file is missing.

A few things can hide one. It might sit at a non-standard path this tool does not probe, it might be behind a firewall or bot rule that blocks non-browser requests, or it might be a compressed .gz file at an unusual name. It is also worth ruling out a soft-404: some sites answer every unknown URL with a normal-looking page, which is not a real sitemap even though it loads. If you know the URL, paste it into the box that appears and this will verify it directly.