Pull the full URL inventory out of any sitemap or sitemap index, including lastmod dates, and download it as CSV or TXT for audits, migrations, and post-launch tracking.
A sitemap file is built for crawlers, not for people. The moment you need to work with your URLs — sort them, annotate them, compare them against another list — you want them in a spreadsheet, and the fastest honest source for that list is the sitemap itself. Exporting turns the file from a crawl directive into an inventory.
Three workflows in particular keep coming back to a sitemap export:
lastmod column tells you when each page was last touched, which is often enough to spot stale clusters without touching a CMS.site: searches or Search Console pages report, you know where to invest — internal linking, content quality, or pruning.The CSV export includes both loc and lastmod so it drops straight into Sheets or Excel, and the TXT export (one URL per line) is the format that crawling tools, log analyzers, and link-building utilities typically expect as an input list.
The two sitemap tools on this site share a parser but answer different questions. The validator is judgmental: it checks well-formedness, absolute URLs, duplicates, and date formats, and returns a pass/fail with a fix list. The extractor is permissive: its job is to get every usable URL out of the file even when the file is imperfect. If a sitemap has one bad lastmod or a duplicate entry, the extractor still returns the good entries and surfaces the parser notes separately, so a slightly messy sitemap never blocks an export.
In practice, extract first; validate only when something looks wrong. If the extractor comes back empty, that is itself a diagnosis — the file probably has malformed XML or a wrong root element, which is exactly what the validator will detail.
Large sites usually publish a sitemap index — a root file that points at dozens of child sitemaps rather than listing pages directly. Give the extractor the index URL and it follows one level deep: it fetches up to 20 child sitemaps concurrently and merges their entries into a single list, with a per-child status showing how many URLs each shard contributed. If a child fails to fetch or the run hits its time budget, you still get everything collected so far, flagged as partial results with the failed children listed. If your index has more than 20 children, extract in batches by pointing the tool at the child sitemaps directly.
Extraction caps at 50,000 URLs per run, matching the protocol's per-file URL limit; a sitemap index pointing at more entries than that returns the first 50,000 flagged as capped. Each sitemap file is fetched with a 5 MB decompressed ceiling. Gzip-compressed sitemaps (.gz) are not supported yet — if your server publishes sitemap.xml.gz, extract from the uncompressed sitemap.xmlinstead. And since the tool reads the sitemap as published, URLs that exist in the file but were removed from the site (or vice versa) will only surface when you compare the export against the live site — the sitemap is a claim, not a verification.
The file itself, not a page that links to it — usually https://example.com/sitemap.xml or https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml. If you are unsure, check robots.txt for a Sitemap: line; that is the canonical location most sites declare.
No. The tool fetches the sitemap server-side, parses it, and hands the list back to your browser for download. Nothing is submitted to search engines and no URL is stored.
lastmodis optional in the sitemaps protocol, and many generators omit it. In the CSV export the column is simply blank for those rows. Treat missing dates as “unknown,” not as “old.”
Yes — sitemaps are public files by design, and reviewing a competitor's URL structure is a standard way to find content categories or directory pages you have not covered. Use it as research input, not as a copy list.
Partial means the run hit the URL cap, the 20-child limit, or the time budget. Check the child list for failures, then run the extractor directly on any child sitemaps that were skipped and merge the downloads.
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