How Does Webflow's Sitemap Work?

Yes — Webflow can automatically generate and maintain your sitemap.xml, updating it every time you publish, and you can exclude individual pages from it or replace it with a custom sitemap you write yourself. All of this lives in Site settings, not in a page you have to build by hand. This guide covers the exact toggles, sourced from Webflow's help center, and where the sitemap setting connects to robots.txt.

Does Webflow generate a sitemap automatically?

Yes. Webflow's help center describes the feature directly: "Webflow's auto-generated sitemap feature automatically generates a sitemap.xml for your site and updates it each time you publish your site" (Webflow Help Center, "Create a sitemap in Webflow", checked September 2026). To turn it on: go to Site settings > SEO tab > Sitemap section, toggle Auto-generate sitemap to Yes, click Save changes, then publish. Every URL entry gets its own <lastmod> tag, and Webflow is specific about how that timestamp behaves: it "updates automatically each time you publish changes to that page, but you'll need to republish your site before the updated timestamp appears in the sitemap." If your site has Localize enabled, the auto-generated sitemap also includes hreflang tags "for all static and dynamic pages on your site to help search engines understand the available language and region variants of your site content."

One thing to know before you enable it: Webflow's help page states plainly, "It isn't possible to delete the /sitemap.xml page once you've created your sitemap and published your site." Turning auto-generation off later replaces the sitemap's contents, but the page itself stays.

How do I exclude a specific page from the sitemap?

This is a per-page toggle, separate from the site-wide sitemap setting, and it does two things at once. Webflow's help center: go to the page in question, open Page settings > SEO settings, and toggle Sitemap indexing to off, then publish. Webflow states that this toggle "adds <meta content=\"noindex\" name=\"robots\"> to your site page," which is what actually keeps it out of search results — and, specifically for the sitemap, "if you disable indexing of a static site page with the Sitemap indexing toggle, that page will no longer be indexed by search engines and will no longer be included in your site's sitemap" (Webflow Help Center, "Disable search engine indexing", checked September 2026). This toggle only works if your site's auto-generated sitemap is already turned on: "You can only disable indexing with the toggle if you've enabled your site's auto-generated sitemap."

A common mix-up is trying to hide a page by blocking it in robots.txt instead. Webflow's own guidance says that's the wrong tool for actually removing indexed content: "if you disable indexing of a site page via a robots.txt file, the page will still be included in your site's auto-generated sitemap." The same is true of an older custom-code noindex tag — it also leaves the page in the sitemap "unless you toggle Sitemap indexing to off." For CMS Collection items specifically, Webflow documents a separate toggle at the Collection level, and notes that per-item search indexing control "is only available on paid Site plans."

Can I write my own custom sitemap instead?

Yes. Webflow's help center: go to Site settings > SEO tab > Sitemap section, toggle Auto-generate sitemap to No, then "paste your custom sitemap in the Custom sitemap.xml field," save, and publish. This is meant for a specific setup: "if you use a reverse proxy to connect multiple Webflow sites to a single domain, you can remove the default sitemap.xml address and add your own to your sites' robots.txt file" so search engines understand the sites share a domain. One caveat if your site uses Localize: a custom sitemap doesn't get Webflow's automatic hreflang handling, so "you'll need to manually add hreflang tags for each page, or consider custom code alternatives."

What's the connection between the sitemap and robots.txt?

Webflow links the two by default. Its help center states: "Webflow automatically adds your sitemap.xml address to your site's robots.txt file" — whether the sitemap is auto-generated or custom. If you also add a sitemap line to robots.txt manually on top of that, Webflow warns "the file will contain 2 sitemaps for search engines to crawl." Removing the default reference to substitute a different root-domain address is possible, but it's plan-gated: "Removing the default sitemap.xml address from your site's robots.txt file requires a paid Site plan." That happens through a different panel — Site settings > SEO > Indexing — where you toggle Remove sitemap.xml from robots.txt on and add your own Sitemap: line.

That same Indexing panel is where you set the rest of robots.txt. Webflow's rules follow the standard format: User-agent to name the bot, then Allow or Disallow to control access, and the help center is direct about a limitation worth remembering: "Not all bots follow the rules specified in your robots.txt file, especially malicious or poorly configured ones... these bots may still access your site" (Webflow Help Center, "Set robots.txt rules", checked September 2026). It's also public by design, not a privacy control: "Your site's robots.txt file is publicly visible — avoid relying on it to protect sensitive or private content." The same Indexing panel now also has a separate Content-Signal header for AI crawlers specifically — letting you state whether content can be used for AI training, search indexing, or AI-generated answers independently of the crawl rules above — though Webflow flags this as experimental: it "is based on a proposed extension to RFC 9309 and is not yet an accepted standard."

What plan do these settings need?

Most of the sitemap and robots.txt controls above — auto-generating a sitemap, excluding a static page with Sitemap indexing, writing a custom sitemap, and setting robots.txt rules — are available regardless of Site plan. The specific gate Webflow documents is removing the default sitemap reference from robots.txt to replace it with a custom one, which "requires a paid Site plan," and per-item indexing control on CMS Collection items, which is "only available on paid Site plans." If you're unsure whether your site is even on a paid plan yet, our guide to Webflow's free Starter plan covers exactly what Starter includes.

How do I submit the sitemap to Google once it's set up?

Webflow's help center gives this as a separate final step: open Google Search Console, choose the property for your site, type sitemap.xml into the input field, and click Submit. Webflow adds a useful note on timing here too: "Google may automatically find and index your website through a link on another site, but verifying ownership of your site, submitting a sitemap, and manually requesting that Google index your site can typically speed up the process." If pages still aren't showing up in Google after your sitemap is submitted, our guide to why a website builder site isn't on Google covers the platform-neutral checks — Search Console's URL Inspection tool and the Sitemaps report — that confirm what's actually happening, rather than guessing from a site: search.

What if I change my mind after publishing a custom sitemap?

You can switch back. Toggling Auto-generate sitemap back to Yes replaces a custom sitemap's contents with Webflow's own generated version on the next publish — but remember the one thing that doesn't undo: once /sitemap.xml exists as a published page on your site, Webflow's documentation says you can't delete that page outright, only change what's in it.

Where does Figment fit in?

Nowhere directly here — Figment publishes a Figma design as a live site through its Figma plugin, and it isn't a CMS with the kind of sitemap and robots.txt settings panel Webflow documents above. If your real question is whether to keep building on Webflow or check its broader SEO controls first, our guide to Webflow's SEO settings covers the rest of that panel — titles, canonical tags, Open Graph, and schema markup — in one place.

Bottom line: Webflow's sitemap is automatic by default and updates on every publish, with a per-page Sitemap indexing toggle to actually remove a page from both the sitemap and search results — not a robots.txt block, which leaves the page in the sitemap. A custom sitemap is available if you turn auto-generation off, and removing the default sitemap reference from robots.txt is the one piece of this that needs a paid Site plan.