Best Sitemap Scrapers and Parsers
Browse sitemap scrapers and parsers that crawl XML sitemaps and sitemap indexes to extract URLs for discovery, auditing, and scraping pipelines.
Last reviewed July 2026
Quick answer
A sitemap scraper is the right tool when you need a declared URL inventory before crawling, auditing, or seeding a data pipeline. Compare sitemap discovery, index recursion, gzip handling, streaming behavior, and export formats before choosing one.
How to choose
Best for
- Teams that need the URLs declared in available sitemaps before a crawl.
- SEO and site audits comparing declared URLs against the live site.
- Discovery pipelines that seed a scraper from a domain's sitemaps.
What to compare
- Whether it auto-discovers sitemaps from robots.txt and common paths.
- Whether it recurses sitemap index files and handles gzipped .xml.gz files.
- Memory behavior on very large sitemaps, especially streaming instead of loading all URLs at once.
- Output format and how easily URLs export to CSV or JSON.
Before you commit
- Check whether the tool fetches pages itself or expects you to supply the bytes.
- Check the license and language ecosystem before adopting it.
Frequently asked questions
What is a sitemap scraper and why use one?
A sitemap scraper reads published XML sitemap files to collect their declared URLs. Those URLs can seed a crawl or support an audit. A sitemap is a discovery source, not proof that every website page is listed.
Sources (checked ): XML sitemap protocol; Google sitemap overview
How do I extract all URLs from a sitemap?
Fetch the sitemap, parse its URL entries and follow child sitemaps referenced by sitemap indexes. Deduplicate the collected URLs before exporting them. This returns the declared sitemap URLs, not necessarily every URL on the website.
Sources (checked ): XML sitemap protocol
How is a sitemap crawler different from a full site crawler?
A sitemap reader follows published URL lists and indexes. A link-following crawler discovers URLs through page links. Their results can differ: a sitemap may include pages not reached through links, while a crawler can find linked pages omitted from the sitemap.
Sources (checked ): XML sitemap protocol; Google sitemap overview; Scrapy architecture
How should sitemap index files and .xml.gz files be handled?
A sitemap index lists child sitemap locations that must be fetched and parsed. Sitemap files can be gzip-compressed; decompress them before parsing the XML, and apply the protocol’s size limits to the uncompressed content.
Sources (checked ): XML sitemap protocol
How do tools auto-discover sitemaps for a domain?
Look for Sitemap declarations in robots.txt or use a supplied sitemap URL. Common paths such as /sitemap.xml can be checked, but they are conventions rather than a guarantee that every website publishes a sitemap there.
Sources (checked ): XML sitemap protocol; Google sitemap overview
What are the limitations for an XML sitemap?
A URL sitemap can contain at most 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50 MB uncompressed. Larger collections can be split into multiple sitemaps and referenced from an index. Compression does not increase the uncompressed size limit.
Sources (checked ): XML sitemap protocol
Does a sitemap improve SEO?
A sitemap helps search engines discover URLs and understand update information. Google does not guarantee that submitting a sitemap will cause every listed page to be crawled or indexed; it is not a guaranteed ranking improvement.
Sources (checked ): Google sitemap overview
How do I submit a sitemap to Google?
Make the sitemap accessible, then submit its URL through Google Search Console’s Sitemaps report or reference it in robots.txt. Keep the URL available so Google can retrieve it.
Sources (checked ): Build and submit a sitemap
