Sitemap XML URL Extractor: every URL of a website

Sitemap XML URL extractor: every URL a website lists in its XML sitemaps, up to 100 sites per run. Sitemaps are found through robots.txt and the usual paths, sitemap indexes and gzip are followed, and each URL comes with its lastmod, changefreq and priority. Pay per URL.

Why this scraper

• Only delivered results are charged. Inputs that fail come back as clear error records at no cost.
• No crawling: the site's own sitemap files are read, so a whole site is listed in a handful of requests. Measured on apify.com and gov.uk: 300 URLs each, discovered through robots.txt and a sitemap index, for less than a tenth of a cent.
• Discovery and etiquette built in: sitemaps are found through the Sitemap: lines of robots.txt and the usual paths, sitemap indexes and gzip files are followed, plain-text sitemaps are read too, duplicates are dropped, and every sitemap fetch is checked against the host's robots.txt rules first. Each URL keeps the sitemap it came from, its lastmod, changefreq and priority.

Who this is for

Paste domains, site URLs or sitemap URLs in sites (up to 100 per run) and set maxUrlsPerSite (default 5,000, ceiling 50,000). Every row carries the site, the sitemap file the URL came from, the URL, its last modification date, change frequency, priority and the number of image entries attached to it.

Who this is not for

A sitemap lists what the site owner chose to list; pages missing from it are not found, and a site without any sitemap comes back as one free NO_SITEMAP error row. lastmod, changefreq and priority are optional in the sitemap standard and empty when the site leaves them out (apify.com gives none of them, gov.uk gives lastmod and priority). URLs are delivered in sitemap order up to the ceiling; on very large sites the cap decides which part you get.

Input fields

Field	Type	Required or default	What it does
sites	list of text	required	One per row, up to 100: a domain (example.com), a site URL, or a sitemap URL (https://example.com/sitemap.xml).
maxUrlsPerSite	number	5000	Cost ceiling per site, in sitemap order.

Input example

{
    "sites": [
        "apify.com"
    ],
    "maxUrlsPerSite": 5000
}

Output example

Field	Type	What it holds	Example
site	text	The site this sitemap was found for.	apify.com
sitemapUrl	text	The sitemap file this row came out of; a large site splits them over several.	https://apify.com/sitemap/pages.xml
url	text	The address the sitemap lists.	https://apify.com/
lastmod	text	Filled when the sitemap publishes a last-modified date for the URL.
changefreq	text	How often the site says the page changes, as stated in the sitemap.
priority	number	The weight the site gives the page itself, from 0 to 1; this is a claim, not a measurement.
imageCount	number	How many images the sitemap lists with this page.	0

Error codes: INVALID_SITE, NO_SITEMAP, BLOCKED, FETCH_FAILED.

One delivered row looks like this:

{
  "site": "apify.com",
  "sitemapUrl": "https://apify.com/sitemap/pages.xml",
  "url": "https://apify.com/",
  "lastmod": null,
  "changefreq": null,
  "priority": null,
  "imageCount": 0,
  "status": "ok"
}

Related actors from steadydata

• technical-seo-audit: audit the pages the sitemap lists
• website-tech-stack: the technology behind the site
• rss-feed-reader: the site's feeds, discovered from the homepage
• Used together with webpage-to-markdown and pdf-text-extractor in a recipe: Feed a RAG pipeline with clean page text.

Pricing

Pay per event: one url-listed event per delivered result. No charge for inputs that fail, no separate platform-usage surcharge.

Free Apify plan: this actor delivers up to 25 rows per run for accounts on the Apify free plan, and then stops with a message. That limit is set by us, not by Apify. It exists so the actor keeps paying for itself for the people who do pay. Any paid Apify plan runs it at full size, billed per delivered row, with failed rows never charged.

Reviews: if this actor saves you time, a short review on this page is the one thing that helps most. Ratings are what other buyers look at first, and we have no other way to ask.

FAQ

Does it crawl the pages? No, it only reads the sitemap files; that is what makes it fast and cheap. Use the Technical SEO Audit actor from the related actors below to fetch and check the pages themselves.

What if I know the sitemap URL? Paste it directly; discovery is skipped and that file (and any index it points to) is read.

Are gzip sitemaps supported? Yes, .xml.gz and gzip-encoded bodies are unpacked.

Does it respect robots.txt? Yes. A sitemap path a site disallows in its robots.txt is skipped, not fetched.

Do I pay for a site without a sitemap? No. Only delivered URL rows are charged.

Is personal data collected? lastmod is passed through as the site wrote it (a date or a full timestamp); imageCount counts the image entries the sitemap attaches to the URL.

What happens when the source changes? Sources change from time to time; that is the nature of this work. The actor is monitored daily and fixed fast, and while it is broken you are not charged, because only delivered results cost anything.

Can I call it from my own code, like an API? Yes. Every run is available through the Apify API: start it with one HTTP request, then read the results as JSON, CSV or Excel from the dataset endpoint, or use the official Python and JavaScript clients. The input is the same JSON as in the input example above, so a scheduled script, a Make or Zapier step or an AI agent can call it without any changes.