In an effort to optimize our Service Portal for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I created a page via the Scripted REST API that would automatically generate an XML sitemap for ingestion by search engine bots like Google and Bing.

You can see an example result in the above screenshot; Navigating to https://INSTANCE.service-now.com/api/uocd2/seo triggers a script that builds an entire sitemap of all available public Service Portal pages, including every knowledge base category, knowledge base article, and service catalog category/details page. Since it is generated at the time of the request, the sitemap is always up-to-date for the search engine.

For our Service Portal, that is more than 3500 pages (and growing) provided in the sitemap, along with predicted expiration dates for each page. With such a large amount of pages, having an automatically generated XML sitemap is invaluable.

In the first four months of the implementation, our production instance’s sitemap has been crawled over 1000 times.

Additionally, I implemented a user-agent grabber so that we can see how often the sitemap is grabbed and by whom: