Sitemap URL Discovery

Given a domain, finds sitemap.xml + sitemap_index.xml (also via robots.txt), recursively expands nested sitemaps, returns one row per discovered URL with lastmod / changefreq / priority. SEO audits, crawl-target prep, content cataloging. $0.01 site fee + $0.0001/URL.

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Why this exists

Before you scrape, audit, or index a site, you need to know what's there. The site's own sitemap is the authoritative list — but discovering it requires:

1. Checking common paths (sitemap.xml, sitemap_index.xml, wp-sitemap.xml)
2. Parsing robots.txt for Sitemap: directives
3. Recursively walking sitemap-index → child sitemaps
4. Parsing each one for <url> records

This actor does all of it with sane fallbacks. Returns a summary + one row per discovered URL.

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What you get

Summary row

{
  "_type": "summary",
  "site_url": "https://www.apify.com",
  "sitemaps_scanned": 5,
  "sitemap_urls": [
    "https://www.apify.com/sitemap.xml",
    "https://www.apify.com/sitemap-index.xml",
    "https://www.apify.com/sitemap/actors1.xml",
    ...
  ],
  "urls_discovered": 12384
}

Per-URL row

{
  "_type": "url",
  "url": "https://www.apify.com/store/actors/...",
  "lastmod": "2026-06-08",
  "changefreq": "weekly",
  "priority": "0.7"
}

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Quick start

Discover all URLs on a domain

{
  "siteUrl": "https://www.apify.com"
}

Only product / actor pages

{
  "siteUrl": "https://www.apify.com",
  "pathContains": "/store/actors/",
  "maxUrls": 5000
}

Cap scan size for huge sites

{
  "siteUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org",
  "maxUrls": 100000,
  "maxSitemapFiles": 50
}

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Pricing

Pay-Per-Event:

• $0.01 — flat fee per site (covers initial discovery)
• $0.0001 — per URL row returned

Run	URLs	Cost
Small SaaS site	200	$0.03
Mid-sized blog	5,000	$0.51
Mega site	100,000	$10.01

Vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider ($259/yr), Sitebulb ($175/yr) for one-off audits.

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Use cases

1. SEO audit — Pull every URL with its lastmod; find stale content
2. Crawl planning — Feed URLs into Web → Markdown or your own scraper
3. Content monitoring — Detect new URLs by comparing snapshots over time
4. Competitor research — See what a competitor's catalog looks like
5. Sitemap sanity check — Verify sitemap-index works; catch broken nested sitemaps

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Limitations

• No HTML scraping fallback — If a site has no sitemap (rare for serious sites), this returns 0 URLs. For HTML-link-crawling, use a crawl-specific actor.
• Doesn't honor noindex — A URL in sitemap might still be noindex in HTML; this actor returns what's in sitemap.

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Related actors (same author)

• Web Page → Markdown Converter — Convert discovered URLs to text
• HTML Metadata Extractor — Pull meta tags from each URL
• PDF Text Extractor
• JSON Schema Generator

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Feedback

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