What is Sitemap?

A sitemap is a file, usually written in XML, that lists the addresses of a site’s pages and, optionally, their last modification dates for search engines in a single file.

The sitemap usually sits at the site’s root under the name sitemap.xml and is announced in two ways: it is submitted through the Sitemaps report in Search Console, and it is written into the robots.txt file on a line starting with “Sitemap:”. The limit Google sets is at most 50,000 addresses or 50 MB uncompressed per file; larger sites split the sitemap and combine the parts with an index file.

A sitemap is a list, not a request. Google writes that it does not guarantee every address in the sitemap will be crawled or indexed, but adds that in most cases a site benefits from having one. Small sites with well-built internal linking can be found without a sitemap; for large sites, new sites with few external links and sites with rich media, a sitemap matters more. If you would like to check together whether the sitemap is set up correctly on your site, SEO consulting starts with this file.

The real value of a sitemap is that it provides a basis for comparison. The pages it lists are the written list of pages you want to see in the index; Search Console puts this list side by side with the index status. Every page that is in the sitemap but not in the index is a page to look into.

What does a good sitemap include, and what does it leave out?

• It includes only main addresses: pages meant to appear in search results that declare themselves canonical.
• It uses full addresses: addresses starting with “https://” and including the domain.
• It includes the last modification date (lastmod) only if it is accurate; Google uses this field only if it is consistently and verifiably accurate.
• It does not rely on the priority and changefreq fields; Google ignores both.

First-hand example: this site’s sitemap is generated in the same build as the pages, and each address’s date is derived from the dateModified field in the page’s own structured data; the page and the sitemap cannot state two different dates for the same address. Only pages actually generated in that build can enter the sitemap. This rule came out of an audit finding: the sitemap had once also listed pages that had not been generated yet, in other words, promised Google 404s. We explained setup details and the “Sitemap could not be read” error in the sitemap guide, and sitemaps for multilingual sites in a separate guide.

The sitemap is not the only route to discovery. We covered how it differs from the IndexNow protocol, which notifies search engines of page changes instantly, in a comparison.

If you want to find out together why your site doesn’t show up on Google, SEO consulting audits every layer from crawling to indexing and makes the fix in the source code.