---
id: ultimate-sitemap-parser
version: "1.8.1"
license: GPL-3.0-or-later
license_treatment: copyleft
maintenance: active
---

# ultimate-sitemap-parser — A performant library for parsing and crawling sitemaps

License: copyleft · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 198.4K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Ultimate Sitemap Parser is a Python library that discovers and parses sitemaps in all common formats—XML, RSS, Atom, plain text, and Google News/Image variants—and extracts URLs into an object tree. It handles malformed sitemaps gracefully, discovers sitemaps linked from robots.txt, and uses memory-efficient Expat XML parsing to avoid loading entire hierarchies into memory at once.

The library is designed for web crawlers and indexing workflows. You give it a homepage URL, and it returns a tree of sitemap objects you can iterate over to get all discovered pages. It has been field-tested with approximately 1 million URLs as part of the Media Cloud project and depends only on python-dateutil and requests, making installation straightforward on any modern Python environment.

Use it for:

- Discover all pages on a website by parsing its sitemap hierarchy for web crawling or SEO audits.
- Extract URLs from Google News or Image sitemaps for specialized content indexing.
- Build a site map inventory by recursively following nested sitemap references.
- Integrate sitemap discovery into a web scraper to respect site structure and robots.txt directives.
- Analyze sitemap coverage to identify missing or orphaned pages in a website.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Parses and crawls sitemaps in multiple formats (XML, RSS, Atom, plain text, Google News/Image) and extracts URLs efficiently without loading entire trees into memory.

Yes. The library is actively maintained, has low install friction, no known vulnerabilities, and solves a specific problem well—parsing diverse sitemap formats reliably. The copyleft GPL-3.0-or-later license is the main constraint: use it freely in open-source projects, but review licensing implications before bundling into proprietary software.

## Install

pip install ultimate-sitemap-parser
uv add ultimate-sitemap-parser
poetry add ultimate-sitemap-parser

## Installing ultimate-sitemap-parser

Before you install: Low friction: pure Python wheel with only two stable runtime dependencies (python-dateutil and requests). Actively maintained as of 2026-06-16 with 256 repository stars.

License in practice: GPL-3.0-or-later (copyleft): you must license any derivative work or bundled application under compatible terms; suitable for open-source projects but requires legal review before use in proprietary software.

Quickstart:

pip install ultimate-sitemap-parser

from ultimate_sitemap_parser.tree import sitemap_tree_for_homepage

tree = sitemap_tree_for_homepage('https://www.example.org/')
for page in tree.all_pages():
    print(page.url)

Requires Python 3.10 or later; network access to fetch sitemaps from target URLs.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the library handles redirects or authentication when fetching sitemaps from protected URLs.
- Memory consumption profile on very large sitemap hierarchies beyond the ~1 million URLs mentioned in testing.
- Whether custom web client support extends to proxy configuration or certificate handling.

## Package facts

- License: GPL-3.0-or-later (copyleft)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 198.4K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

sitemap parser xml, crawl sitemaps python, extract urls from sitemap, sitemap tree parsing, google news sitemap parser, rss atom sitemap, robots.txt sitemap discovery, web-crawling, sitemap-discovery, xml-parsing

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/ultimate-sitemap-parser) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/ultimate-sitemap-parser/)