XML Sitemap Generator

How this tool computes its result

Crawls a site server-side up to a selected URL cap (100-10,000) and depth (1-6 levels), with options to keep or strip query parameters and an exclude-path list supporting * wildcards. For each crawled URL, depth is derived client-side by counting non-empty path segments; an optional <lastmod> is stamped with today's date for every URL (not a real per-page modified date), an optional <priority> starts at 1.0 and steps down 0.1 per depth level (clamped between 0.5 and 1.0), and an optional <changefreq> maps from depth (0=daily, 1=weekly, 2=monthly, 3+=yearly).

Worked example

Crawling a site to depth 2 with priority and lastmod on: the homepage (depth 0) gets priority 1.0, a page one level deep gets priority 0.9, and a page two levels deep gets priority 0.8 -- all three share the exact same <lastmod> date, since it is stamped at generation time rather than read from each page.

When not to use this tool

<lastmod> values are always the generation date, never a real content-modified date, so submitting this sitemap unedited tells crawlers everything changed today regardless of actual publish history -- fine for initial discovery, misleading for recrawl prioritization if left as-is.

Common mistakes

• - Enabling "include last modified tags" and treating the resulting dates as accurate -- they are always today's date at generation time, since the tool has no access to each page's real last-modified metadata during a link crawl.
• - Setting max crawl depth to 1-2 on a large site and being surprised the sitemap is incomplete -- pages more than that many folder levels deep from the start URL are never visited or included.
• - Treating the 10,000-URL dropdown cap as the sitemap spec limit -- the actual XML sitemap spec allows up to 50,000 URLs per file (noted in the tool's own helper text), so very large sites still need the split/merge tool after generating.

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