How to find the sitemap of any website

The fastest way

Enter the domain in a sitemap finder. It runs every check below at once: it reads robots.txt, tries the standard locations, and opens each candidate to confirm it really is a sitemap rather than a page that happens to load.

If you'd rather check by hand, these are the places to look.

1. Check robots.txt

Open https://example.com/robots.txt in your browser and look for lines that start with Sitemap::

User-agent: *
Disallow: /checkout/

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

This is the most reliable source, because it's where search engines look first, and it's the only place that can point to a sitemap on a different domain or path. A site can list several Sitemap: lines.

2. Try the standard URLs

If robots.txt doesn't list one, add these to the end of the domain, one at a time:

• /sitemap.xml, the most common by far
• /sitemap_index.xml
• /sitemap-index.xml
• /sitemap.xml.gz, a compressed version
• /sitemap.txt, a plain list of URLs

One catch: many sites answer any unknown URL with their homepage and a 200 status. If a URL loads a normal web page rather than a page of XML, it isn't a sitemap.

3. Look up the platform's default

4. Look in the page source

A few sites link their sitemap from the homepage's HTML. Open the page source (Ctrl+U, or ⌘+Option+U on a Mac) and search for sitemap. You may find a <link rel="sitemap"> tag or a link to an HTML sitemap page in the footer.

5. Check Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools

For a site you own, the Sitemaps report in Google Search Console lists every sitemap that has been submitted, and when Google last read it. Bing Webmaster Tools has the same report. These are the only places that show sitemaps submitted directly to a search engine without being listed anywhere public.

6. Search for it

Searching site:example.com filetype:xml sometimes turns up a sitemap that has been indexed. It's hit and miss, because most sitemaps aren't indexed as pages, but it can reveal sitemaps at unusual paths.

7. When there is no sitemap

Not every site has one, and small sites with good internal links can be crawled fine without one. If it's your site, add one:

• WordPress already has /wp-sitemap.xml unless it has been switched off.
• Most hosted platforms generate one automatically.
• Static and framework sites can generate one at build time, such as @astrojs/sitemap for Astro or next-sitemap for Next.js.

Then add a Sitemap: line to robots.txt and submit it in Search Console, so every search engine can find it.

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