Sitemap Generator

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Sitemap Generator

    The ServiceNow® Sitemap Generator application enables customers to define and automatically generate XML sitemaps for their public portal pages. These sitemaps enhance search engine optimization (SEO) by making portal pages more discoverable to web crawlers.

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    The application is available for activation on your ServiceNow instance or via the ServiceNow Store, requiring admin role permissions for activation.

    Key Features

    • Automatic Sitemap Generation: Create XML sitemaps from scripts or static XML that reflect your public portal content.
    • Access Control Compliance: Only includes pages with unauthenticated (public) access. Non-public portal URLs are automatically excluded, with exceptions for custom domain URLs.
    • Exclusion of Non-Indexable Pages: Pages responding with 301 redirects or containing NOINDEX meta tags (e.g., retired or expired pages) are excluded to ensure SEO best practices.
    • Support for SEO Enhancements: The sitemap includes canonical URLs and hreflang tags where applicable, using the SEO script includes to maintain consistency.
    • Human Readable URLs: URLs with human readable keywords are included by leveraging the SPSEOUtilsSNC class methods to improve URL clarity and SEO impact.

    Practical Guidance

    When customizing your sitemap via scripts, you should incorporate logic similar to the SEO script includes provided by ServiceNow to handle NOINDEX tags, canonical URLs, and hreflang tags effectively. Templates within the Sitemap Generator help ensure these requirements are met.

    The sitemap generator logs excluded URLs in the Application Log [syslogappscope] table for auditing and troubleshooting.

    Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Improves SEO for public portals by creating compliant and optimized XML sitemaps.
    • Ensures only appropriate, publicly accessible content is indexed by search engines, avoiding SEO penalties.
    • Supports enhanced SEO features such as canonicalization and localization through hreflang.
    • Provides automation and templates to simplify sitemap creation, saving time and reducing errors.

    Use the ServiceNow® Sitemap Generator application to define and automatically generate XML sitemaps to improve search engine optimization of public portal pages.

    Activation information

    You can activate the Sitemap Generator application (sn_ux_seo_sitemap) from your instance. For more information, see Activate Sitemap Generator.

    You can also activate Sitemap Generator from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.

    Sitemap requirements

    The sitemap is generated from a script or static XML. When creating a sitemap, you must ensure that its contents meet the following requirements because validating them isn’t handled automatically:

    • Includes only pages with unauthenticated user access.

      Sitemap Generator automatically excludes portal URLs that aren’t publicly accessible from sitemaps. However, this doesn’t apply for URLs with custom domains instead of the ServiceNow domain. URLs that are excluded from the sitemap are listed in the Application Log [syslog_app_scope] table.

    • Excludes pages that respond with a 301 redirect.
    • Excludes pages with the NOINDEX meta tag, such as retired or expired pages. If you use a script to create the sitemap, include logic similar to that of the SEO script include you used to add NOINDEX meta tags to pages to exclude those pages from the sitemap. For more information, see Configure custom SEO tags for canonical URLs and localized knowledge articles.
    • For any pages with canonical URLs or hreflang tags, the sitemap includes those canonical URLs or URLs with hreflang tags returned by the SEO script include for that page. If you use a script to create the sitemap, include logic similar to that of the SEO script include you used to return canonical URLs or URLs with hreflang tags. For more information, see SEO for canonical URLs and localized versions of knowledge articles.
    • For any pages with human readable keywords in URLS, the sitemap includes those URLs with human readable keywords. If you use a script to create the sitemap, use one of the getHumanReadableUrl methods in the SPSEOUtilsSNC class to return the human readable keywords and include them in the sitemap URLs. For more information, see Add human readable keywords to page URLs.
    Note:
    Guidance on how to meet these requirements is included in the code templates in the Script and Static XML fields where the sitemap contents are defined. For more information, see Generate XML sitemaps for SEO indexing.
    For more information about sitemap requirements for SEO, refer to the following resources: