Why this generates from a pasted list instead of crawling your site#
A crawler-based sitemap generator has to fetch every page of a site from a server, which this tool — being entirely client-side with no backend — cannot do. The trade-off is a feature, not just a limitation: you decide exactly which URLs belong in the sitemap, rather than trusting a crawler to correctly discover them and skip the ones that should not be indexed. For a site with a known, stable URL list — most small-to-medium sites — pasting the list is faster than waiting on a crawl anyway.
What lastmod, changefreq and priority actually do#
lastmod tells a search engine when a page last changed, which can influence how often it gets re-crawled — but Google has stated it largely ignores changefreq and priority as ranking or crawl signals, treating them as hints at best. They're included here as optional because some tools and less dominant search engines still read them, but the field that actually matters is lastmod, and only when it reflects a real, accurate change date — a sitemap where every URL claims to have changed today, every day, trains crawlers to stop trusting the field.
Where the sitemap goes after this#
A generated sitemap.xml is typically uploaded to the site's root (https://example.com/sitemap.xml) and referenced with a Sitemap: line in robots.txt — the Robots.txt Generator on this site adds that line automatically. From there, submitting the sitemap URL directly in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools speeds up discovery beyond just waiting for the crawler to find the robots.txt reference on its own.