mapping-urls

Mapping URLs

crawlberg map <url> discovers the URLs a site exposes without rendering or extracting any page content. It reads sitemap.xml (including nested sitemaps), then falls back to link extraction from the seed page. Use it to plan a crawl, audit a site's surface, or feed a URL list into another tool.

Quick recipe

crawlberg map https://example.com --limit 500 --search docs --format markdown

Markdown output prints one URL per line — convenient to pipe into a file or a follow-up crawl. JSON output (default) returns a structured MapResult.

Flag surface

Flag	Default	Purpose
--limit	—	Maximum number of URLs to return. Unbounded if unset.
--search	—	Case-insensitive substring filter on discovered URLs.
--respect-robots-txt	off	Honour robots.txt. Pass it for any third-party host.
--format	json	json (full MapResult) or markdown (one URL per line).
--timeout	30000	Per-request timeout in ms.
--browser-mode	auto	auto, always, never — see the headless-fallback skill.
--browser-endpoint	—	External CDP ws:// URL.
--config	—	Inline JSON or @file.json for the full CrawlConfig.

map takes a single seed URL positionally. There is no --depth or --max-pages here — those bound a crawl, not a map. Scope is the seed host's sitemaps plus links found on the seed page; bound the result with --limit and narrow it with --search.

How discovery works

1. Fetch and parse sitemap.xml, following nested <sitemapindex> entries.
2. If no sitemap (or a thin one), extract links from the seed page's HTML.
3. Apply the --search substring filter (case-insensitive), then --limit.

No page bodies are rendered, so a map of hundreds of URLs returns in seconds — far cheaper than crawling. In --browser-mode auto the seed fetch still falls back to headless Chrome if the seed page is a JS shell that hides its links; pass --browser-mode never to keep it static-only.

Output

Markdown mode

https://example.com/
https://example.com/docs/
https://example.com/docs/getting-started
https://example.com/blog/post-one

JSON mode

Top-level MapResult with a urls array; each entry carries the discovered url. Read result.urls[i].url for each string when scripting.

crawlberg map https://example.com --format json | jq -r '.urls[].url'

Common patterns

Discover then crawl a subsection

crawlberg map https://example.com --search /docs/ --format markdown > urls.txt

Feed the filtered list into a bounded crawl, or scrape individual entries.

Audit a third-party site politely

crawlberg map https://unknown.example --respect-robots-txt --limit 200

When to reach for crawl instead

If the user needs the page content (Markdown, metadata, tables) rather than just the URL list, use crawlberg crawl — see the crawling-a-site skill. Reach for map first when the goal is enumeration, planning, or seeding.