Sitemap Finder

Where sitemaps actually live

There is no rule that an XML sitemap must sit at /sitemap.xml. The protocol only requires that a sitemap covers URLs at or below its own directory, which is why real sites scatter them across a handful of conventions.

• /sitemap.xml is the default convention, and what most crawlers try first.
• /sitemap_index.xml is what Yoast SEO and Rank Math produce on WordPress.
• /wp-sitemap.xml is WordPress core, from version 5.5 onwards, when no SEO plugin overrides it.
• /sitemap.xml.gz is a gzipped sitemap, common on large catalogues.
• /post-sitemap.xml and /page-sitemap.xml are child files that some plugins expose directly.
• /sitemaps/sitemap.xml appears when a CDN or static host puts generated files in a subdirectory.

How to find a sitemap by hand

1. 01

   Read robots.txt first

   Open example.com/robots.txt and search for a line starting with Sitemap. This is the declared, authoritative answer when it exists.

2. 02

   Try the standard paths

   In order: /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /wp-sitemap.xml. Between them they cover the large majority of sites.

3. 03

   Check Search Console

   If it is your own site, Indexing then Sitemaps lists every sitemap Google knows about, including ones never declared in robots.txt.

4. 04

   Search the index

   A site: query restricted to filetype xml occasionally surfaces sitemaps at unusual paths.

5. 05

   Declare what you find

   Once you know the URL, put it in robots.txt. That is the fix that makes every future search unnecessary.

What to do once you have found it

• Validate the file against the sitemaps.org protocol, to catch namespace, encoding, and size problems.
• Extract every URL into a CSV, following any sitemap index down through its children.
• Crawl the URLs inside it to find dead links, redirects, and noindex pages the sitemap still declares.
• Build a visual tree to see the site structure the sitemap describes.
• Test the robots.txt itself, to confirm crawlers are not blocked from the pages the sitemap lists.

If there is no sitemap at all

Small sites with clean internal linking often get crawled perfectly well without one. Sitemaps matter most when a site is large, when pages are poorly linked, or when content changes faster than crawlers naturally return. If yours falls into any of those, the sitemap generator will build one from a live crawl.

Every path the finder checks

robots.txt is checked first, because that is where a correctly configured site declares its sitemap. When there is no directive, these are the paths worth trying, in order of how often they turn out to be right.

How to declare a sitemap so nobody has to hunt

The reason this tool has to guess at nine paths is that most sites never declare where their sitemap is. Two lines of configuration remove the guessing for every crawler that will ever visit you.

1. 01

   Add a Sitemap line to robots.txt

   An absolute URL, outside any user-agent block: Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml. You can list several, one per line. This is the only mechanism most non-Google crawlers have, including the AI crawlers.

2. 02

   Submit it in Search Console

   Indexing, then Sitemaps, then the path. Google reports parse errors and discovered URL counts there within a few days, which is the fastest feedback loop available on whether the file is actually working.

3. 03

   Keep it at a stable URL

   Moving a sitemap costs you the crawl history attached to the old location. If you split one file into an index, keep the original URL serving the index rather than retiring it.

4. 04

   Serve it uncompressed or gzipped, not both

   Both forms are valid, but declaring two URLs that contain the same entries means two sets of crawl requests for one set of pages. Pick one and declare that.

Frequently asked questions