Hit 100 Users With a Simple Sitemap Finder I Built for Myself
A few months ago, I got tired of manually hunting for sitemaps during SEO audits.
Most sites keep them in standard locations, but enough hide them in unusual places that checking manually became a repetitive task. So I built a small sitemap finder for my own workflow.
What started as a personal utility has now crossed 100 users.
A few things I learned:
Solving your own problem is still the best way to find product ideas.
Small SEO utilities can attract users faster than large all-in-one platforms.
Removing signup requirements dramatically increased usage.
Users care more about speed and simplicity than feature lists.
The most interesting challenge has been dealing with websites that use dynamic sitemap generation or intentionally obscure their sitemap locations.
For those building SEO tools: what's the smallest tool you've built that ended up getting the most traction?
This milestone is tiny compared to many businesses here, but it's encouraging to see people finding value in something that started as a weekend project.
Great question—blocking is a tough nut to crack. I've found that checking robots.txt for hints or trying alternate paths like /sitemap_index.xml usually helps, but dynamic ones often need a crawl workaround. What's your go-to method for those stubborn cases?
Good question! For sites that intentionally block sitemaps, I've had some luck using fallback methods like checking common paths (sitemap.xml, sitemap_index.xml) or parsing the robots.txt for hints. Dynamic sitemaps are trickier—I usually rely on crawling the site structure or using cached versions if available. Curious if you've found any other workarounds?
Dynamic sitemaps are a beast, but if you’re dealing with SPAs, looking at the router config or using a headless browser to sniff network requests can uncover them. Have you ever tried intercepting the API calls instead of the raw sitemap?