What’s The Best Way to Find the Sitemap of Any Website?

A website’s sitemap is an incredibly useful bit of data. From the perspective of the site owner, they’re a critical tool to help with indexation to ensure that Google and other search indexes know where every page on the site is, even if they aren’t linked from other pages or even publicly available yet. From a user’s perspective, they can be a handy way to fuel things like RSS-style content readers so you can make sure you never miss a post. You can even use them for marketing, to scrape the pages on a site (even just their titles) for use in your own research efforts.

The question is, how do you find the sitemap of a site? Most websites don’t just have a link to their sitemap in their top bar navigation, after all.

Do All Sites Have Sitemaps?

First of all, it’s worth being aware of one fact: a sitemap is not a critical element of a site. That means many sites, especially sites that don’t care about marketing (or do care but are bad at it), haven’t created them. It’s also possible that a site can have a sitemap, but that sitemap isn’t actively updated because it’s manually generated.

I’m going to list a bunch of different ways you can try to find the sitemap of a site, but it’s entirely possible that you might go through the list and not be able to find it even after you’ve tried all of the options.

If that’s the case, you’re basically out of luck, at least in terms of an actual sitemap document.

However, if you still want the information, you have a few options.

• Use an RSS or Atom reader. Many of the modern CMSs have a built-in RSS or Atom feed enabled by default, and you can often pull data from that in much the same way as you might from a sitemap. It won’t be formatted the same way and will take more work, but it’s available.
• Use a scraper. Tools like Screaming Frog or Greenflare are great options for scraping a site. You won’t get all of the hidden pages and unlinked pages, but you’ll get the majority of what’s on a site (at least up to the point where the scraper peters out; you won’t be scraping a huge domain like Forbes or Medium, of course) and can use that data for your purposes.
• Use a site explorer. Some of the SEO platforms have site explorer tools that can index and report on the pages on a site. As an added bonus, this can order the pages by performance, traffic, or links, so you have more value there.

You can also use Topicfinder. I made Topicfinder as a title-scraping juggernaut aimed squarely at topic research, and I’m quite proud of what I’ve made. It’s a powerful way to get a deep dive look into the titles and pages your competitors are maintaining, and it’s easy to use to boot. Give it a look!

All that aside, let’s talk about the ways you can find a site’s sitemap.

Option 1: Try the Common URLs

The first option is to simply assume that the site owner, if they’re using a sitemap, is using the most common best practices to implement it, so it should be easy to find.

Just take the URL, start appending the common filenames to the end, and see if you land a hit.

• www.example.com/sitemap.xml
• www.example.com/sitematp_index.xml
• www.example.com/sitemap1.xml

You can also try things like sitemap.php, sitemap.xml.gz (for larger sites where the sitemap is compressed), sitemap/ for sites where the sitemap is a directory, sitemap/sitemap.xml, and other variations.

If the domain’s root directory doesn’t work, try variations.

• Type the URL with and without the www.
• Type the URL in HTTP and not HTTPS.
• Try subdirectories, like example.com/blog/sitemap.xml.

Your goal is to look in common places and with common file names, to try to find the file.

You can also try different file types. While XML is the most common file type for a sitemap, you might also find them as a .txt file, a .html file, or even a .rss file. That’s right; Google and other apps can use a .rss file as a sitemap, so some sites use their RSS files as sitemap files. In some cases, you might also find a .json sitemap as well, though these are a lot less common.

RSS files are generally found at /rss/, /rss.xml, or /atom.xml. These can all be good variations to try.

One thing to be cautious of if you’re trying this method is that sometimes, in rare cases, a site’s anti-botting security scripts can trigger on a bunch of repeated attempts and 404s like this, and you might be temporarily blocked from accessing the site. It’s pretty rare – I’ve only had it happen once that I can remember, and it was a five-minute block – but it’s something you might want to keep in mind.

If you can’t find a sitemap in this fashion, generally, one of three things is happening.

• You haven’t guessed the right combination.
• The website owner has hidden their sitemap somewhere to make it harder to guess.
• The site has no sitemap.

Fortunately, if there’s a sitemap, one of the other methods should still work.

Example: Topicfinder’s sitemap is named sitemap_index.xml and is in the root; you can find it here. I have a nested sitemap structure, so this sitemap is an index of other sitemaps, each of which is a full sitemap for a particular kind of content, like blog posts or pages. Note that it’s generated by Yoast SEO; any site using Yoast will generally have this same format.

Option 2: Check the Site’s Robots File

Many sites have a file called robots.txt. This is a file, typically in the root directory for the site, that gives bots and web crawlers instructions. It’s a way to tell bots like Google’s to ignore irrelevant system pages, for example, and it’s also a way to guide rule-abiding bots to specific destinations, like a sitemap. You can just give Google your sitemap directly from your Search Console, but this is another way to make sure they have it.

The downside is that now you have to find the robots.txt file. On the plus side, you know that the robots.txt file is named “robots.txt” because it can’t be named anything else. Most of the time, if a site has a robots.txt file, it’s in the root directory as well. So, check:

• www.example.com/robots.txt

And see if that gets you where you want to go. Sometimes, you may need to do the no-www or http/https thing to find it, but other times, it will pop right up.

Example: Topicfinder’s robots.txt is fairly empty. It’s also generated by Yoast, but since I’m not blocking pages using it, it’s effectively empty. You can see it here. Yoast puts the sitemap URL in the robots.txt block it generates so you can see the sitemap link in the robots.txt file.

Option 3: Check Google

A third option is to use Google search operators to see if they’ve indexed (and not noindexed) the sitemap.

Basically, you just need a two-part Google search. The first part specifies the URL, something like “site:Topicfinder.com”. This ensures that the results are only pages on the specified domain. The second part is how to find the sitemap itself. You can try a few things:

• Simply put “sitemap” in quotes and see what comes up, though this will also show any page on the site that uses the word sitemap.
• Use the URL operator for “inurl:sitemap” to find any URL that includes the word sitemap. This will also pop up blog posts with the word sitemap in the URL, but that probably won’t be more than a few.
• Use the filetype or file extension operators for XML files, like “filetype:xml” or “ext:xml,” to locate XML files on the site. You can do this with other file types as well, though it obviously won’t work for something like HTML.

For example, the query “site:apple.com inurl:sitemap.xml” only has a couple of results, but the top result is the full, unformatted XML sitemap for Apple.com.

My biggest word of caution here is that Google has a habit of flagging and rate-limiting these kinds of queries. Even just testing out three or four options for this post, they gave me a captcha for “suspicious traffic” because of it. They really don’t expect people to be using these kinds of advanced operators anymore, and it’s a pain for those of us who know what we’re doing.

Option 4: Use a Sitemap Validation Tool

Since the presence of a sitemap is a small but noteworthy SEO factor, it has become part of marketing and SEO audits. That means many different SEO auditing and validation tools will check for the presence of a sitemap, essentially by automating some of the options above.

There are also a bunch of different tools that can check and see if a site has a sitemap.

• SEOptimer’s Sitemap Checker
• SEO Site Checkup’s Sitemap Test (Note the free version only works for checking one URL per hour.)
• SEOMator’s Sitemap Finder
• ToolsADay’s Sitemap Checker
• SEO.AI’s Sitemap Checker

These are just some of the checker tools I’ve pulled from the top Google results for such tools. They all work pretty much the same way, so it doesn’t really matter which one you pick.

Option 5: Logical Digging

This one is a bit of a long shot if the other methods haven’t worked, but it can still be worth trying.

First, figure out what the CMS is that the site you’re researching is using. There are some tools that can do this for you, or you can look at the code directly and check for identifying features, like scripts in WP directories or meta information identifying a page builder. I like WhatCMS as a quick check, though if a site is heavily customized or completely custom, it can hang and won’t give you good results.

Next, go to the documentation for that CMS and figure out if they have a default sitemap and, if so, where and what format it is.

Then, armed with that information, go back to the site and test those locations. If they have a sitemap made by the CMS by default, that’s how you’ll find it.

Option 6: Google Search Console

This option is down here at the end because it’s only useful if you’re trying to find your own sitemap. If you’ve uploaded your sitemap to Google in the past, in your Search Console, you’ll be able to find it under the Sitemaps section under indexing in the sidebar. Bing’s webmaster tools have the same thing.

Obviously, though, this only works for your own website, because you can only access the search console for your own site.

No Sitemap? No Problem!

If you’re trying to research a site and you can’t find a sitemap, my two recommendations are a scraper like Screaming Frog, or just using Topicfinder.

What you use really comes down to why you wanted to find a sitemap in the first place.

If you’re just trying to audit a site and fix issues, not finding a sitemap is good enough, and you can just talk to the site owner and help them create one for use with Google and other indexes.

If you’re trying to perform title and topic research, Topicfinder is a much faster and smoother way to do it. A sitemap will give you URLs, but often, that’s just about it. Topicfinder, meanwhile, will give you titles as well as useful SEO information you can use to turn those titles into topic ideas of your own.

Finally, a scraper like Greenflare or Screaming Frog will give you a bunch more data, which you can use for a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of a site.

So, whatever it is you need a sitemap for, something on this page should help you out. What do you think? What options have given you the best results in the past?

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