You need a sitemap. You want it free. And you do not want to get three URLs into a crawl before a paywall appears and asks for a credit card.
So, we tested out a few of the most popular XML Sitemap generators we could find (including our own).
How we tested
We used one test site for every tool: books.toscrape.com, a public sandbox built for this purpose. It has roughly 1,100 URLs, which matters, because every free tier caps out well below that.
Out of the box, it has no robots.txt and no existing sitemap, so no tool could shortcut by reading one someone else generated.
Many of these tools have tiers. Screaming Frog, Sitemap.ai, XML-Sitemaps.org, and more all offer limited crawls for guests, slightly higher limits for logged-in or paid users.
Quick comparison view
The best free XML sitemap generators
Sitemap.ai
What it is: A browser-based generator that crawls your domain and produces an XML sitemap, an llms.txt file, an HTML sitemap, and a CSV of every URL, from one crawl. No install, no signup for the basics.
How the test went: As a guest, a modal rendered a live preview of each page as it was fetched, with a counter reading "14/500 URLs crawled." It finished at 502 URLs in about 3 minutes 20 seconds, landing on a results page with five export buttons and a table of every URL with its priority, changefreq, and lastmod.
We're always working to improve our tool, so if you find anything else we mentioned or didn't mention here, please let us know. Without an account, you can get an XML sitemap, llms.txt, csv, and HTML sitemap.
Pros: No install and no signup for XML, llms.txt, HTML, or CSV. It is the only tool here producing an llms.txt file alongside your XML sitemap. A free account lifts you to 2,000 URLs per crawl without a credit card. It sits next to a sitemap validator, a sitemap finder, and an AI crawler checker.
Cons: Markdown export needs a free account. It does not host your sitemap, update it on a schedule, or report broken links. If you want a sitemap that maintains itself, a CMS plugin beats us.
Best for: A custom or headless stack wanting a sitemap plus the AI-era files in one pass.
XML-Sitemaps.com
What it is: The tool most people mean when they say "the free sitemap generator." Running since 2005, with more than 51 million sitemaps created by its own count.
How the test went: The cleanest paywall experience of the lot. It crawled for about 3 minutes 34 seconds, stopped at exactly 500 URLs out of 788 discovered, and displayed an unambiguous "LIMIT EXCEEDED." No dark pattern, no pretending it finished.
We checked the file: exactly 500 <loc> entries, 500 <priority> values, 500 <lastmod> values, well-formed XML. Without registering you can pull sitemap.xml, a gzipped version, an HTML sitemap, a urllist.txt, and an ROR feed.
Pros: Genuinely free, genuinely no registration, honest about its ceiling. Broadest set of free output formats of any web tool we tested.
Cons: No change frequency at all. We confirmed this three ways: the form exposes only "lastmod" and "priority" checkboxes, the results preview shows only those two columns, and the file contains zero <changefreq> tags. For more you need the $49.99 standalone script or the PRO service, from $2.44 per month, which adds hosting and auto-submission.
Best for: A one-off sitemap for a site under 500 pages.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free edition)
What it is: A desktop crawler that SEO professionals live inside, running on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Many "best sitemap generator" posts claim the free edition cannot export an XML sitemap. That is false. Screaming Frog's own free-versus-paid comparison table ticks "Generate XML Sitemaps" in both columns, and its tutorial states the spider is "free in lite form, for up to 500 URLs." Image XML sitemaps are free too.
Free tier reality: 500 URLs per crawl, no signup. Its FAQ says the free version "does not require any form of email capture, or sign up. Simply download, and use, without the sales."
The £199 per year license unlocks scheduling, crawl configuration, JavaScript rendering, saving crawls, custom robots.txt, and integrations with Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights.
Pros: Screaming Frog is more of a technical SEO tool than just an XML sitemap creator. It is arguably the most capable crawler here. Even free, it flags broken links, redirects, duplicate pages, and hreflang problems while building your sitemap. If you searched for a screaming frog sitemap workflow, the free edition does the job at small scale.
Cons: A desktop install. No JavaScript rendering on the free tier, so a React or Vue site crawls badly. No HTML sitemap output.
Best for: Auditing while generating, if you do not mind installing software.
My Sitemap Generator
What it is: A dedicated sitemap factory. Not a suite, not a planning tool, just sitemaps and feeds.
How the test went: Processed 507 pages and wrote exactly 500 URLs in about 2 minutes 30 seconds. It also hands you a tracking URL, so you can close the tab and come back to your file later.
Free tier reality: 500 URLs, three file-creation requests per 24 hours, no registration.
Pros: The widest output range in this review: XML, HTML, image, hreflang, and visual sitemaps, plus RSS and ecommerce product feeds. It is also the most configurable free tool, exposing change frequency, priority, last-modified, crawler settings, exclusion rules, and URL filtering. Paid access is unusually humane, with one-time passcodes from $2.50 that require no account.
Cons: Three files per day constrains iteration. Automatic updates and hosting are subscription-only. The interface shows its age.
Best for: Multilingual sites needing hreflang, or anyone wanting a product feed and a sitemap from one tool. If you want an xml-sitemaps.com alternative, start here.
Slickplan
What it is: Mostly a visual site-architecture and site-planning application. The XML sitemap generator is a secondary utility attached to it.
Free tier reality: The one entry that is not really free. Slickplan's "free" is a 14-day trial requiring an email signup before it generates anything. The trigger is not a URL count, it is the trial expiring. Paid plans run $10.79 to $103.49 per month.
Pros: If you are planning a site's structure rather than listing its URLs, Slickplan does something the others do not attempt. It supports lastmod, changefreq, and priority.
Cons: No sitemap without handing over an email address.
Best for: Agencies planning information architecture, where the XML file is a byproduct.
Prepostseo
What it is: A free XML, HTML, and TXT sitemap generator on a large free-tools site. No signup.
Free tier reality: 500 pages, stated only after you press the button ("If you are a free user then your site map will be automatically done after 500 pages"), which is why its meta description still claims "No limit on pages."
How the test went: Well... Prepostseo returned 74 URLs for our 1,100-page test site. Those 74 are precisely the 73 links on the homepage plus the root, meaning it crawled a single level deep and stopped. We didn't try to test further as we found the UI to be old and dated.
The output has a worse problem. Every one of the 74 entries carries <lastmod>1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00</lastmod>, the Unix epoch. The last-modified setting defaults to "Use server's response," and when Prepostseo cannot read one it writes a fabricated 1970 date rather than omitting the tag. Submit that and you are telling Google every page on your site last changed in 1970.
Best for: Nothing we would recommend. Use XML-Sitemaps.com instead.
SiteGPT
What it is: A free, no-signup XML sitemap generator attached to an AI chatbot product. It advertises the highest free ceiling we found anywhere: a "Maximum URLs to include" selector running to "50,000 URLs (max)," with crawl depth up to five levels.
How the test went: It did not work. First, we set the URL limit to 50,000 URLs, but with that option selected, the crawl wouldn't start. So, we set it to 10,000 URLs and five levels, and it climbed to 85 percent, then returned "Error: An unexpected error occurred. Please try again." Three attempts, zero URLs each time. We waited around 15 minutes but it never got any better.
To be fair, the console also showed Cloudflare challenge resources failing, so we cannot separate a broken tool from bot-detection refusing our session. Either way, the 50,000 figure is advertised, not demonstrated.
Best for: Nothing we can vouch for.
SEOptimer
What it is: A free sitemap generator attached to a paid SEO-audit suite. XML only, no signup.
How the test went: The fastest tool here by a wide margin. Set to a 500-page crawl, it returned a sitemap in roughly 40 seconds, against two to three and a half minutes for everything else.
Two flaws. Its banner reads "Sitemap generated for 500 links" while the file contains 499 <loc> entries. More seriously, every URL is written as http:// even though our test site is HTTPS only, pointing search engines at the wrong canonical protocol.
Pros: Very fast, no signup, and its page-count selector goes to 5,000, ten times the category norm.
Cons: XML only. The protocol downgrade is a defect you would fix by hand.
Best for: A fast, larger free crawl, if you check the output first. It appears buggy.
Do you even need a generator? CMS-native sitemaps
For a large share of readers the honest answer is no, and we would rather say so than sell you a tool.
If you run WordPress with Yoast SEO or Rank Math, you already have an XML sitemap. Both generate one automatically, keep it updated when you publish, and split it into a sitemap index as you grow. Searching for an xml sitemap generator for WordPress usually means installing a plugin you may already have. WordPress core has shipped a basic sitemap since version 5.5.
Shopify generates /sitemap.xml on every store and updates it as you add products. There is no Shopify sitemap generator to install. Wix and Squarespace do the same.
A standalone generator produces a static snapshot that goes stale the moment you publish your next page. The CMS version does not. Use the CMS version.
You need a standalone tool on a custom or headless stack, when you want to audit what a crawler genuinely sees, or when you need output your CMS does not produce, such as llms.txt.
Where Google Search Console fits
Search Console does not generate sitemaps. It never has. It validates and submits them.
The confusion is understandable, because Search Console is where the sitemap conversation ends. You generate a file with one of the tools above, upload it to your domain root, then submit the URL under Sitemaps. Google reports how many URLs it discovered, how many it indexed, and which threw errors.
That last part is the real value. A sitemap Google reads and rejects is worse than useless, because you will not know. It verifies, it does not create.
How to choose the right one for you
On WordPress. Use Yoast or Rank Math. You can use a generator to validate your XML sitemaps or test them out, but these plugins do the job.
On Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace. You already have a sitemap at /sitemap.xml. Submit it to Search Console and move on.
A small custom site, under 500 pages. XML-Sitemaps.com or Sitemap.ai. Free, no account, honest about its ceiling.
A headless or custom stack, and you care about AI search. Sitemap.ai, which produces an XML sitemap and an llms.txt from the same crawl. Take the free account for 2,000 URLs.
You want to audit while you generate. Screaming Frog's free edition.
You need hreflang or product feeds. My Sitemap Generator.
A large or frequently changing ecommerce catalog. None of the free tiers will serve you. A static 500-URL file regenerated by hand is a liability on a catalog that changes daily. Use your platform's native sitemap, or a paid tier that hosts and auto-updates.
What to do after you generate a sitemap
Generating the file is the easy part.
Upload it to your domain root, so it resolves at https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
Add the Sitemap directive to robots.txt. One line:
Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xmlThis is how crawlers that never visit Search Console find your sitemap, and it is the most-skipped step.
Submit it to Google Search Console (and Bing Webmaster Tools, another minute).
Validate it to catch malformed XML, dead URLs, wrong protocols, and bogus dates. Our sitemap validator does this, and as SEOptimer and Prepostseo showed, it is not a formality. If you are unsure whether your site already has a sitemap, our sitemap finder checks robots.txt and the common paths.
Then keep it current. A sitemap listing pages you deleted six months ago wastes crawl budget.
FAQ
What is the best free XML sitemap generator?
For smaller sites or mid-size sites, we'd recommend our own tool Sitemap.ai. But, you can also consider XML-Sitemaps.com, which crawls up to 500 URLs with no account and hands you XML, HTML, and TXT files. If you want more configuration, My Sitemap Generator matches the 500-URL cap and adds hreflang, image, and visual sitemaps.
How do I create a sitemap for free without any tool?
If you use a CMS, you already have one. WordPress core, Yoast, Rank Math, Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace all generate /sitemap.xml automatically. For a small static site you can hand-write the XML, since a valid sitemap is a <urlset> element containing one <url> and <loc> pair per page. Past thirty pages, use a generator.
What is the URL limit for a single XML sitemap?
A single sitemap file may contain at most 50,000 URLs and must not exceed 50MB uncompressed. If your site is larger, split it across multiple sitemap files and list them in a sitemap index file, itself an XML file pointing to your sitemaps. The index has the same limits. Most generators handle the split automatically once you cross the threshold.
Do I need a sitemap generator if I use WordPress, Shopify, or Wix?
No. All three produce and maintain an XML sitemap automatically, and it updates itself when you publish. A standalone generator gives you a static snapshot that starts going stale immediately. The one reason to run a crawler anyway is to audit what a search engine actually sees, which sometimes differs from what your CMS believes it published.
What is the difference between an XML sitemap and an HTML sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file for search engines, listing every URL plus optional metadata such as last-modified date and priority. An HTML sitemap is an ordinary web page listing your links for human visitors, usually reached from the footer. Search engines read the XML, people read the HTML. Larger sites often publish both.
Does an XML sitemap help with AI search and tools like ChatGPT?
Indirectly. AI crawlers fetch sitemaps to discover pages, so a current sitemap helps them find your content. But a sitemap lists URLs, it does not describe them. That gap is what llms.txt aims to fill, giving models a curated guide to your site. Adoption is early and no major AI provider has committed to honoring it, so treat llms.txt as low-cost insurance, not a ranking mechanism.
How often should I regenerate my sitemap?
If your CMS generates it, never, because it maintains itself. With a standalone tool, regenerate whenever you meaningfully change your URL structure, and at minimum whenever you add or remove a batch of pages. For a site publishing weekly, monthly regeneration is reasonable. For a daily-changing ecommerce catalog, a manual file is the wrong approach.
The short version
If your CMS makes a sitemap, use it. If not, Sitemap.ai or XML-Sitemaps.com gives you a clean file with no account, My Sitemap Generator gives you more formats, and Screaming Frog's free edition audits while it builds. Whatever you use, open the file before you submit it.
We built Sitemap.ai for the case none of those cover: a custom stack needing an XML sitemap and an llms.txt from one crawl. It is not the fastest here, and it will not host your file. It is free to try without an account, and now you know where it stands.