How to Find Any Website's Sitemap (6 Places to Look)
Updated July 25, 2026
🛠️ This guide pairs with our free Sitemap URL Extractor — Pull every URL out of an XML sitemap or sitemap index, with lastmod dates and free CSV export.
Whether you’re auditing a site, sizing up a competitor, or building a crawl list, the sitemap is where you start — it’s the site’s own declared list of pages. But it isn’t always at the obvious address. Here’s the checklist that finds it on practically any site, in the order worth trying.
1. The standard paths
Type these directly into your address bar:
https://example.com/sitemap.xml
https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
https://example.com/sitemap-index.xml/sitemap.xml alone covers a large share of the web. If it 404s, keep going — plenty of sites have one elsewhere.
2. robots.txt (the official pointer)
https://example.com/robots.txt is where sites declare their sitemap location for crawlers:
Sitemap: https://example.com/wp-sitemap.xmlThe Sitemap: line is part of the robots.txt spec precisely so the file can live anywhere. Some sites list several — a page sitemap, an image sitemap, a news sitemap. This is the single most reliable method, because it’s the one search engines themselves use.
3. CMS-specific defaults
If you can tell what platform a site runs (generator meta tag, /wp-content/ in source), go straight to its convention:
| Platform | Default sitemap |
|---|---|
| WordPress (core, 5.5+) | /wp-sitemap.xml |
| WordPress + Yoast SEO | /sitemap_index.xml |
| WordPress + Rank Math / AIOSEO | /sitemap_index.xml |
| Shopify | /sitemap.xml (index of products/collections/pages) |
| Wix | /sitemap.xml |
| Squarespace | /sitemap.xml |
| Blogger/Blogspot | /sitemap.xml and /atom.xml?redirect=false&max-results=500 |
| Ghost | /sitemap.xml |
4. Search engine operators
Ask Google for indexed sitemap files directly:
site:example.com filetype:xml inurl:sitemapThis also surfaces child sitemaps (e.g. /sitemap-posts-2024.xml) that an index references, which is handy when the index itself is blocked from you.
5. Check the page source
Some sites link their sitemap in the HTML head or footer. In view-source (Ctrl+U), search for sitemap — you’re looking for <link rel="sitemap" ...> or a footer anchor. Less common, but free to check while you’re there.
6. Common alternates and subdirectories
Larger or older sites sometimes keep sitemaps in odd places:
/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
/sitemap/sitemap-index.xml
/sitemap1.xml
/post-sitemap.xml
/page-sitemap.xml
/news-sitemap.xmlFound it? Turn it into a URL list
A sitemap is XML built for crawlers, and large sites split it across a gzip-compressed index of child files. To get the actual page list out of it, paste the URL into our free Sitemap URL Extractor — it follows sitemap indexes recursively, decompresses .xml.gz, and exports every URL (with lastmod dates) to CSV, TXT or JSON. For a deeper walkthrough of what to do with the list, see how to extract all URLs from an XML sitemap.
What if the site has no sitemap?
It happens — small hand-built sites, and occasionally large sites that simply never shipped one.
- Crawl instead: point a crawler (Screaming Frog’s free tier handles 500 URLs) at the homepage and let link-following discover pages.
- Use the search index:
site:example.comin Google shows what’s indexed; page through for an approximate inventory. - Check the Wayback Machine:
web.archive.orgoften has historical snapshots including old sitemap files, useful for migrations and research.
And if the site is yours and has no sitemap: fix that today. Every mainstream CMS and static-site generator produces one automatically, and it’s the cheapest crawlability win available — search engines find new content faster and waste less crawl budget re-discovering old pages.