Sitemap URL Extractor & Validator

Get every URL a website lists in its sitemaps, with last-modified dates, in one run. Give it a site and it finds the sitemaps itself, or give it a sitemap URL directly.

What you get

• Every URL from XML sitemaps, sitemap indexes (nested), gzip sitemaps (.xml.gz) and plain-text sitemaps
• lastmod, changefreq and priority for each URL, when the site provides them
• The sitemap each URL came from
• A validation report per sitemap in the key-value store (SUMMARY): where the sitemaps were found, how many URLs each one has, and warnings such as more than 50,000 URLs, dates not in W3C format, or URLs on another host

Typical uses: building a URL list for an SEO audit or a link check, monitoring which pages a site adds or changes, feeding a crawler or an AI pipeline with a site's pages.

How it works

1. It reads the site's robots.txt and follows its Sitemap: lines.
2. Without them, it tries /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml.
3. It follows sitemap indexes down to the URL lists and stops at your URL limit.

It only reads the sitemaps, never the pages themselves. Image, video and news sitemap extensions (titles, captions, descriptions) are left out. It respects robots.txt and sends one request at a time per host. XML with a DOCTYPE is refused for safety.

Input

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.sitemaps.org/", "https://example.com/sitemap.xml"],
  "maxUrlsPerSite": 10000,
  "timeoutSecs": 30
}

Output

One item per URL:

{
  "url": "https://example.com/blog/first-post",
  "lastmod": "2026-09-30",
  "changefreq": "weekly",
  "priority": 0.8,
  "sitemap": "https://example.com/sitemap-posts.xml",
  "site": "https://example.com/"
}

Pricing

You pay per URL extracted. The validation report is free. Set a maximum cost for the run, and the extractor stops at your limit.

Use it from code or AI agents

Run it through the Apify API, schedule it, connect it to Make, Zapier or n8n, or call it from AI agents through Apify's MCP server. Pair it with the URL Status & Redirect Checker from the same author to find broken pages.

FAQ

The site has no sitemap. Then the report says which locations were tried. The extractor does not crawl pages to guess URLs.

Does it read sitemaps behind a login? No. Only public sitemaps.

Provider, privacy and fair use

Provider: HelveticLabs, sole proprietorship of Marvin Krieg, c/o SwissMailBox 170, 12 Rue Le Corbusier, 1208 Genève, Switzerland. E-mail: contact@helveticlabs.org. Imprint: https://www.helveticlabs.org/imprint

Privacy: This Actor runs on the Apify platform, in your Apify account. It processes only the URLs or domains you enter and the public technical data the checked servers return (status codes, headers, certificates, DNS records, sitemap URLs, links). It does not collect personal data: it never stores or returns page text (where a page's HTML is read, it is read in memory only, to find links and measure tags), and it leaves out e-mail addresses, cookie names and values and similar values. Your input and results stay in your Apify account and are stored by Apify under its own terms (https://apify.com/privacy-policy). The provider sees only the usage statistics Apify shows to Actor authors (such as the number of users and runs), not your input or results, unless you share a run for support. Questions about privacy: contact@helveticlabs.org.

Fair use: Check only sites you own or may check. Do not use the results to attack systems or people. The Actor respects robots.txt, identifies itself, and keeps a polite pace per site.

No warranty: The results are automated checks and can be incomplete. They are not a penetration test, legal advice or a compliance certificate.