A sitemap is only useful if it stays accurate. Publish new pages, retire old ones, or change URLs, and a sitemap generated once at launch quietly goes stale. Auto-refresh is the Pro feature that recrawls your site on a schedule you set, so the sitemap stays current without you remembering to regenerate it.
Setting a Schedule
From the Auto-refresh page, pick a site and configure:
- Frequency — daily, weekly, or monthly.
- Day — which day of the week (for weekly) or day of the month (for monthly, up to the 28th, to stay valid across every month).
- Time — a specific hour, in UTC, so the schedule is unambiguous regardless of where you or your team are.
Each site gets its own independent schedule. A daily-changing blog and a mostly-static marketing site don't need the same cadence, so you're not forced into one global setting across every property you manage.
Pausing Without Losing Your Settings
An active toggle lets you pause a schedule temporarily — useful during a migration or redesign, when you don't want automated recrawls picking up a half-finished site — without deleting your configured frequency, day, and time. Turn it back on when you're ready and the same schedule resumes.
The Default for Unscheduled Sites
Pro sites without a custom schedule aren't left completely static — they still get refreshed automatically every Monday at 08:00 UTC as a sensible default. Setting a custom schedule is about tuning the cadence to your site, not switching auto-refresh on in the first place.
Runs in the Cloud, Not on Your Machine
Scheduled crawls execute on the server on your behalf. Your laptop can be closed, asleep, or nowhere near the schedule's trigger time — the recrawl still happens, and the updated sitemap and health data are waiting the next time you check the dashboard. That's the practical difference between this and manually re-running a desktop crawler on a recurring reminder: nothing has to be open or running for the schedule to fire.
What Counts as "Current"
Each scheduled run shows a last-run and next-run timestamp, so you always know exactly when the sitemap was last verified against the live site, and when the next check will happen — rather than wondering whether the file you downloaded last month still matches reality. For the general principle behind how often a sitemap should actually be refreshed, see how often a sitemap should be updated.