Sitemap Finder

A Sitemap Finder is a tool that discovers every XML sitemap a website publishes. Instead of guessing where the sitemaps are located, it reads the site robots.txt and probes dozens of common sitemap paths in parallel — giving you a full inventory of every sitemap URL, its type (index or urlset), URL count and file size.

/sitemap.xml is the most common location, but many sites do not use it. WordPress since version 5.5 uses /wp-sitemap.xml. Yoast SEO exposes /post-sitemap.xml, /page-sitemap.xml, /category-sitemap.xml and more. Shopify uses numbered patterns like /sitemap_products_1.xml. Some publishers keep a separate /news-sitemap.xml for Google News. This tool checks all of them automatically.

The robots.txt file is the officially recommended way for a site to declare its sitemaps, using one or more Sitemap: directives. The finder fetches robots.txt first and lists every sitemap declared there, plus any additional sitemaps found by probing common paths.

Yes. Every candidate URL is fetched, decompressed if it is a .gz file, parsed as XML and validated against the sitemaps.org root elements (<urlset> or <sitemapindex>). Only URLs that pass validation appear as "Sitemaps Found" — broken or misconfigured URLs listed in robots.txt are surfaced separately as warnings.

A urlset (<urlset>) is a regular sitemap containing a list of page URLs. A sitemap index (<sitemapindex>) is a sitemap that references other sitemaps — used when a site is too big for a single sitemap. Large e-commerce and news websites typically publish a sitemap index that points to dozens of child sitemaps.

Yes, as long as they are declared in robots.txt. If a site uses a completely custom path (for example, /assets/xml/all-pages.xml) and does not declare it in robots.txt, the finder will not guess it. In that case, paste the direct URL into our Sitemap URL Extractor instead.

Yes. Enter the full subdomain (for example, shop.example.com or blog.example.com) and the finder will look at that subdomain's robots.txt and sitemap paths. Each subdomain typically publishes its own sitemap independent of the root domain.

No. The finder makes anonymous HTTP requests to publicly available files (robots.txt and standard sitemap paths). No credentials are sent and no notification is triggered — this is the same activity that search-engine crawlers such as Googlebot perform every day.

Some sites use anti-bot protection (Cloudflare, Akamai, custom firewalls) that returns 403 Forbidden for automated requests. When this happens the finder will report the errors and often no sitemaps will be found. Try again later, or verify the sitemaps manually in your browser.

Yes, completely free — no account, no signup and no usage limits beyond the built-in per-request timeout. You can inspect as many domains as you need for SEO audits, competitor research and technical due diligence.