What is XML sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable list of the URLs on your site that you want search engines to discover. It doesn’t force anything into the index, but it hands crawlers a complete, current inventory instead of leaving them to find every page through links.

The format

Sitemaps follow the sitemaps.org protocol, which Google, Bing and other engines support:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/guides/repotting-orchids</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-10-12</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Only <loc> is required. URLs must be absolute, on the same host as the sitemap unless you’ve verified both sites, and XML-escaped — an ampersand in a URL becomes &.

Limits and what Google reads

• Each file holds at most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Bigger sites split into several files listed in a sitemap index.
• Google uses lastmod only when it is consistently accurate, and ignores priority and changefreq altogether (Google’s sitemap guide).
• Extensions exist for images, videos, news articles and hreflang alternates.

Who needs one

Google says sitemaps help most on large sites, new sites with few external links, and sites with lots of media or fast-changing content. A 20-page brochure site with clear navigation gains little — but a sitemap costs nothing to maintain once it’s automated, and Bing also uses it to prioritize crawling.

How to submit it

Add a Sitemap: line to robots.txt, then submit the URL in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Google retired its anonymous sitemap “ping” endpoint in 2023, so pinging no longer does anything. To notify Bing, Yandex and other IndexNow engines instantly, use IndexNow; Google doesn’t support it.

Common mistakes

• Listing URLs that redirect, return 404, carry noindex or canonicalize elsewhere. A sitemap should contain only final, indexable, canonical URLs; every exception teaches search engines to trust the file less.
• Setting lastmod to today on every build, even when nothing changed.
• Forgetting to regenerate after a migration, so the old URL structure lives on.
• Serving the sitemap URL as an HTML error page with a 200 status.

Validate yours

The sitemap validator finds your sitemap via robots.txt or the usual paths, checks the XML and protocol limits, reviews lastmod dates and hreflang alternates, and status-checks a sample of listed URLs for 404s, redirects and noindex. No sitemap yet? The sitemap generator crawls up to 300 pages and builds one. To see where sitemaps fit in discovery, read about indexing.

Frequently asked questions