Find every sitemap
on any website.

How to find the sitemap of a website

There's no single place a sitemap has to live, so work through the methods in order and stop when one answers. The first two work on any site; Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools only work on a site you own or have been given access to.

1. 1Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for lines starting with Sitemap:. Each one is a sitemap the site owner has declared, and it's the most reliable answer.
2. 2Try the common paths by hand: /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /sitemap-index.xml and /wp-sitemap.xml cover most sites.
3. 3Work out the CMS and check its default location (see below).
4. 4On your own site, open Google Search Console and go to Indexing, then Sitemaps. It lists every sitemap submitted for the property and when Google last read it. Bing Webmaster Tools has the same report under Sitemaps.
5. 5Search Google for site:example.com filetype:xml inurl:sitemap. This only finds sitemaps Google happens to have indexed, so an empty result doesn't mean there's no sitemap.
6. 6Scroll to the site's footer. Some sites link an HTML sitemap there, a page for people that often points to the XML one too.

Where common platforms put their sitemap

Most platforms generate a sitemap for you, so the location usually follows from the CMS. These are the defaults; a plugin or a custom setup can change them, which is why robots.txt is still the place to confirm.

WordPress (core)

/wp-sitemap.xml, built in since WordPress 5.5. It's an index that points to separate files for posts, pages, categories and authors.

WordPress with Yoast or Rank Math

/sitemap_index.xml. These plugins switch off the core sitemap and split content into files like /post-sitemap.xml and /page-sitemap.xml.

Shopify, Wix and Squarespace

/sitemap.xml, generated automatically. On Shopify and Wix it's an index pointing to separate files for products, pages, collections or blog posts.

Custom-built sites and frameworks

Anything goes. Frameworks such as Next.js can generate /sitemap.xml, but the path is whatever the developer chose. If it isn't declared in robots.txt, it can be very hard to find from the outside.

Why sitemaps still matter

A sitemap is a machine-readable list of the pages you want search engines to know about. Google can usually find most pages on a small, well-linked site without one; Google itself describes small as roughly 500 pages or fewer. A sitemap helps most when your site is large, new, has few backlinks, has lots of video, image or news content, or buries pages deep in the navigation.

Having one doesn't guarantee anything gets crawled or indexed. Google treats a sitemap as a hint about which URLs you consider important, not an instruction.

Where sitemaps live

The convention is yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, but there's no hard rule. Many sites split content across several files behind a sitemap index, and older CMS migrations often leave a second, forgotten sitemap behind. That's why guessing one URL isn't enough.

Location affects scope. Google recommends the site root: a sitemap there can cover the whole site, while one inside a folder only covers URLs under that folder unless you submit it in Search Console. A sitemap can sit at any path if robots.txt declares it, and robots.txt can list as many Sitemap: lines as you need.

Reading what you find

Open a sitemap URL in your browser and you'll see raw XML, or a styled table if the site adds a stylesheet to it. Each <loc> tag holds one URL. If the file is an index, those URLs are other sitemap files, and you open each one to reach the actual page list.

URL sitemap (urlset)

The list of pages itself, up to 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed per file. It can also carry a lastmod date for each URL.

Sitemap index (sitemapindex)

A sitemap of sitemaps. It lists child sitemap files, not pages, so its count is a number of files.

Declared vs found on a common path

Declared means robots.txt names it, so every crawler that reads robots.txt knows where it is. Found on a common path means it exists but robots.txt doesn't mention it, so a crawler may never look there. Submit it in Search Console or add it to robots.txt.

Broken declaration

robots.txt points to a sitemap that returns an error or times out. Fix the URL or remove the line.

lastmod, changefreq and priority

Google uses lastmod only when it's consistently accurate, and ignores changefreq and priority entirely. A sitemap with every page at priority 1.0 isn't doing anything.

Other sitemap formats

Google also accepts RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds and plain text files with one URL per line. Large sites often gzip their sitemaps as .xml.gz.

If a site has no sitemap

Plenty of small sites don't have one, and Google can still crawl them through internal links. If it's your site and it has more than a handful of pages, it's worth adding one: most CMS platforms can switch it on in settings, or you can generate the file from a crawl of your pages.

Then declare it in robots.txt and submit it in Search Console. Google retired its sitemap ping endpoint in 2023, so those two are now the ways to tell it where your sitemap is.

What to do with what you find

Once you know every sitemap you expose, make sure each one loads, contains the pages you actually want indexed, and is declared in robots.txt. Remove or fix any stale file that 404s.

1. 1Declare every live sitemap in robots.txt
2. 2Delete or fix sitemaps that return errors
3. 3Submit your main sitemap in Google Search Console
4. 4Use a sitemap index if you have many files
5. 5Regenerate when you publish or restructure