Question: Do sitemaps update automatically?

No, sitemaps do not update automatically in most cases. Sitemaps are essentially lists of a website's pages that are accessible to crawlers or users. They're created by web developers or SEO professionals to inform search engines about the pages on their websites that are available for crawling.

However, there are certain content management systems (CMS) like WordPress that have plugins (e.g., Yoast SEO, Rank Math, Google XML Sitemaps) which can create and automatically update your sitemap when new content gets published. If you're not using such a CMS and plugin, you'll need to manually update your sitemap each time you add new pages to your website.

If you have a large site and need to generate and update your sitemap automatically, consider writing a script that would crawl your website and generate an updated sitemap. Here's a very basic Python example using Beautiful Soup:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

def generate_sitemap(url):
    page = requests.get(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(page.content, 'html.parser')

    for link in soup.find_all('a'):
        print(link.get('href'))

generate_sitemap('http://yourwebsite.com')

Please note that this is a basic example and won't handle dynamic or JavaScript rendered content. Also, it simply prints out the URLs, but you could modify it to write the URLs to an XML or TXT file in the proper format for a sitemap.

Remember to submit your sitemap URL to search engines (using tools like Google Search Console) so they know where to find it. Whenever you update your sitemap, the changes would be picked up during their next crawl.