What is a sitemap?
An XML file that lists every important URL on a site so search engines and crawlers can discover them efficiently.
A sitemap is a structured index of a site's public URLs, served from a path like /sitemap.xml. Each <url> entry usually carries the location, a lastmod timestamp, and an optional change frequency and priority. Large sites split their URL inventory into a sitemap index that points to multiple child sitemaps.
For SEO, sitemaps speed up the discovery of new and updated pages, Google does not need them, but it uses them when they exist. For programmatic use, sitemaps are the cleanest possible enumeration of a domain: they are exactly what a polite crawler should hit first before falling back to link-following.
Context.dev's Sitemap Extractor API takes any domain, finds the sitemap (or builds one by parsing the index), and returns the deduplicated URL list, including handling of nested sitemap indexes, gzipped feeds, and robots.txt Sitemap directives.
In the wild
/sitemap.xml, the canonical location/sitemap_index.xml, an index pointing to per-section sitemaps (often used by WordPress)- Image and video sitemaps for richer indexing of media-heavy sites