XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs a site wants search engines to find, with optional details such as when each page last changed. It follows the Sitemaps protocol, which Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to support jointly in 2006. It helps discovery but doesn't guarantee that pages are crawled or indexed.
What goes in an XML sitemap?
Each entry has a loc tag with the full URL and can carry lastmod, changefreq and priority tags. One sitemap can hold 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed; larger sites split them into several files and list those in a sitemap index. List only the canonical URLs you want in search results.
Google ignores priority and changefreq. It uses lastmod to schedule crawls, but only when the dates are consistently accurate and reflect significant changes to the main content, structured data or links, not a new copyright year.
Does every site need one?
Google says a site of about 500 pages or fewer, with every important page linked from others, may not need one. Large sites, new sites with few external links and sites with a lot of video, image or news content gain the most.
How to submit a sitemap
Submit it in the Sitemaps report in Search Console, or add a Sitemap: line with its full URL anywhere in robots.txt. Google announced on 26 June 2023 that its sitemap ping endpoint would stop working six months later. Google treats a submitted sitemap as a hint, not an instruction.
Example
A publisher with 200,000 articles splits its sitemap into monthly files of fewer than 50,000 URLs each, listed in one sitemap index that robots.txt points to. The lastmod date changes only when an article's text is updated, so Google can trust it and recrawl corrected stories sooner.
Related terms
Further reading
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