Skip to content
Q3.Labs, Home

Free Tool

XML Sitemap Generator

Paste your page URLs and generate a valid sitemap.xml file, entirely in your browser.

  • Free
  • · No signup
  • · Nothing uploaded
  • · Standards-compliant XML
An XML sitemap being generated from a list of website URLs

Everything is processed in your browser — nothing is sent to Q3 Labs.

Paste your URLs above and click Validate & Review to get started.

What Is an XML Sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a structured file listing the URLs on a website that you want search engines to be aware of, optionally alongside metadata like when each page was last modified. It follows a standard protocol (the same one this tool generates against) that any compliant search engine or tool can read.

How Does an XML Sitemap Work?

A sitemap.xml file is typically hosted on your website, then referenced in your robots.txt file or submitted directly through a search engine's webmaster tools. Search engines periodically fetch it and use the listed URLs as candidates for crawling and discovery, alongside every other signal they already use, like links and prior crawl history.

How to Create an XML Sitemap

  1. Paste your page URLs into the tool above, one per line.
  2. Click Validate & Review to check them and remove duplicates.
  3. Optionally set a last modified date, change frequency, or priority.
  4. Click Generate Sitemap.
  5. Copy the XML or download sitemap.xml, then upload it to your website.

What URLs Should Be Included?

Generally, a sitemap should contain the important, canonical, indexable URLs you actually want search engines to discover, your real pages, not every technically-reachable variant of them.

What URLs Should Not Be Included?

  • Pages irrelevant to what visitors or search engines should find.
  • Exact duplicate URLs (this tool removes these automatically).
  • URLs you've deliberately marked noindex.
  • Unnecessary parameter variants of the same underlying page.
  • Non-canonical duplicates when a canonical version already exists.

This can vary by site, this tool can't inspect your pages to determine canonical status automatically — it only works with the URLs you provide.

XML Sitemap Format

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

The urlset element with the sitemaps.org namespace wraps one or more url entries, each requiring a loc and optionally including lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

Sitemap Limits

Per the official sitemap protocol and Google's current documentation, a single sitemap file can contain at most 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50MB (52,428,800 bytes) uncompressed. Sites that exceed either limit split their URLs across multiple sitemap files, referenced together by a sitemap index file. This tool warns you as you approach these limits and won't generate a file that exceeds them.

Lastmod, Changefreq and Priority

All three are optional. Google has stated it uses lastmod only when the value is consistently and verifiably accurate, and that it ignores changefreq and priority entirely. None of these fields force a search engine to crawl more often or rank a page higher, they're hints defined by the protocol, not guarantees.

Sitemap vs Robots.txt

A sitemap tells search engines which URLs exist and would like to be discovered. Robots.txt does close to the opposite: it tells well-behaved crawlers which paths they should not request at all. They serve different, complementary purposes, and a sitemap is commonly referenced from within robots.txt using a "Sitemap:" line, which is exactly what this tool's robots.txt snippet generates.

How to Submit a Sitemap

Most search engines offer free webmaster tools (such as Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools) where you can submit a sitemap URL directly, or you can simply reference it in your robots.txt file and let search engines discover it during normal crawling. Q3 Labs isn't affiliated with Google, Bing, or any search engine, this tool only generates the file itself.

Common Sitemap Errors

  • Invalid XML (malformed structure, unescaped special characters).
  • Malformed URLs, or URLs using an unsupported scheme.
  • Using the wrong or a missing XML namespace.
  • Duplicate URLs listed more than once.
  • Listing non-canonical duplicate URLs alongside their canonical version.
  • Stale lastmod dates that don't reflect real changes.
  • An oversized sitemap exceeding the 50,000-URL or 50MB limit.
  • A sitemap referenced in robots.txt that isn't actually reachable at that URL.

Frequently Asked Questions

Explore more

Reference this sitemap from a robots.txt file with our Robots.txt Generator & Tester. Verify each URL actually resolves before adding it here with our HTTP Status Checker, check a page's links with the Broken Link Checker, or inspect its metadata with the Meta Tag Checker. Managing multilingual URLs? Generate hreflang sitemap annotations with the Hreflang Generator & Validator. For a full technical SEO review, run Buzzing Bee, our free website & SEO audit, or explore the rest of our free marketing tools.

Related tools & resources

Related tools

  • SERP Snippet PreviewPreview how your title, URL and meta description could look in a Google-style search result.
  • SEO ROI CalculatorEstimate the revenue and ROI an SEO investment could generate, based on your own traffic, conversion rate, an…
  • Domain Rating CheckerCheck the current Ahrefs Domain Rating of any website. Real data from the official Ahrefs API.

Learn more

  • SEO GuidesTechnical SEO, on-page fundamentals, and the checklist we run against every client site before it goes live.
  • SEO & Organic GrowthMost SEO work stalls after the first few technical fixes because there's no system connecting content, author…

Related articles

We use cookies for analytics to understand site usage. Privacy Policy