Free Tools to Generate, Filter, and Convert Sitemaps and RSS Feeds

You built the thing and it is live. The fun part is over, and what stands between your product and anyone finding it is plumbing: a sitemap search engines can actually read, a feed that is not full of noise, the right subset of URLs submitted to the right console.

Nobody wants to build that plumbing, and it is a silly thing to pay a subscription for. So we built a set of free tools at tools.generativelabs.com and use them ourselves.

This is the toolkit, organized by the job in front of you, with the established tools named honestly alongside ours: a roundup that only lists its own products is a landing page.

How do you generate a free XML sitemap?

Three free ways, and the right one depends on what you already have: a list of URLs, a feed, or neither. A sitemap is worth this small effort because it is the one file search engines ask you for.

• You have a list of URLs: paste it into Sitemap from URLs and get a standard XML sitemap at a unique, shareable URL, editable later by appending /edit.
• You have a feed but no sitemap (many blog and commerce platforms do exactly this): Sitemap from RSS converts the feed's items into a sitemap you can download or submit.^[1]
• You have neither: crawl. XML-Sitemaps.com builds one free for up to 500 URLs with no registration, and Screaming Frog crawls 500 URLs free (a paid license lifts the cap) while auditing as it goes.

Crawlers discover what is linked; our generators publish what you hand them.

And one genuinely odd generator that exists because we needed it: Sitemap from Google Drive turns a public Drive folder into a sitemap, exporting Docs and Sheets as PDFs.

How do you filter or trim a sitemap you already have?

This is the gap in the market. Almost every well-known sitemap tool generates by crawling. Almost none takes the sitemap you already have and cuts it down. Nobody searches for this job, and then one day your sitemap has four thousand URLs and you need exactly it.

Sitemap Filter is our signature tool for that day. Point it at any live XML sitemap, add rules (last-modified date, URL pattern, change frequency, priority), and it returns a new live sitemap URL. The filtered sitemap re-fetches its source on every request, so it stays in sync as the original changes.

Its sibling, Sitemap Subset Selector, takes a random percentage, a random N, a pattern, or a hand-picked selection: useful for staged submissions and for testing anything against a sample of pages instead of all of them.

What is the best free way to filter an RSS feed?

Ask who the filtering is for. If it is for you, use a reader: Inoreader's filtering rules and Feedly's assistant shape what lands in front of your eyes, and NetNewsWire does it open-source on Apple platforms. If it is for another system, a reader cannot help, because what you need is a filtered feed that exists at a URL.

That is RSS Feed Filter: rule-based filtering for RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, output as a clean filtered feed or as a sitemap, served at a persistent URL. Strip a multi-topic feed down to one topic, drop the noise, and hand the result to whatever consumes it next.

How do you check what search engines actually see?

Load your sitemap into Sitemap Describe and it fetches every page's title and meta description into one searchable, paginated table. It is the fastest way we know to spot the page with no description, the duplicated titles, or the template placeholder that shipped.

A crawler like Screaming Frog does this more thoroughly as part of a full audit; Describe does it in one paste when a full audit is more than the moment needs.

And the bonus utility that fits no category: Is Google Account? checks whether an email address is backed by Gmail or Google Workspace. Handy the day you need it, invisible until then.

How do the pieces string together?

The outputs are URLs on purpose, so the tools compose. A real chain we use: a platform publishes a noisy feed; RSS Feed Filter strips it to the items that matter; the filtered URL becomes a sitemap; Sitemap Filter cuts that to the last ninety days; the result goes to the search console.

Four steps, zero code, nothing to host, and every link in the chain stays live.

That plumbing is not a growth hack. It is the baseline of being retrievable, which is worth engineering for even though retrieval alone proves nothing about quality. And it pairs with the longer game: distribution you own beats rankings you rent.

Ship the thing. Then take the one honest hour the plumbing asks for, and let it run itself from there.