• Only list canonical, indexable URLs that return a 200 status.
• The limit is 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed per file. Use a sitemap index beyond that.
• Google ignores priority and changefreq, and uses lastmod only when it is consistently accurate.
• Reference the sitemap in robots.txt and submit it in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Segment sitemaps by page type so indexing problems are easy to isolate.

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable list of the pages on your site that you would like search engines to know about. Think of it as a statement of intent: these are my canonical URLs and this is when they last changed.

Do you need one?

Small, well-linked sites will usually be crawled fine without one. Sitemaps earn their keep when a site is large, new, has few external links, has deep or isolated pages, or changes frequently. They are also the best diagnostic tool you have for indexing coverage, so most sites should have one regardless.

Basic format

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/guides/canonical-tags</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-10-07</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset> 

• loc is required and must be an absolute URL.
• lastmod is optional. Google uses it only if it proves reliable, so update it when the main content changes, not on every deploy.
• priority and changefreq are ignored by Google. Leave them out.

Limits and sitemap index files

A single sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50 MB uncompressed. Larger sites split their URLs across several files and list those in a sitemap index:

 <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/sitemap-products-1.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-10-07</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex> 

Files can be gzipped to save bandwidth. An index cannot point to another index.

What belongs in a sitemap

• URLs that return 200.
• URLs that are self-canonical.
• URLs that are indexable, so no noindex and not blocked by robots.txt.
• The exact version you link to internally: same protocol, hostname, case and trailing slash.

Everything else is noise. Redirects, 404s, parameter variants and noindexed pages in a sitemap tell search engines your signals cannot be trusted.

Specialised sitemaps

• Image sitemaps help discovery of images loaded by JavaScript or hosted on a CDN.
• Video sitemaps provide thumbnails, titles and durations.
• News sitemaps list articles from the last two days for Google News.
• Hreflang in sitemaps uses xhtml:link elements and is often easier to maintain than on-page tags for large international sites.

How to submit

• Add a Sitemap: line to robots.txt.
• Submit in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Google retired its sitemap ping endpoint in 2023, so pinging no longer does anything there.
• For Bing, Yandex and others, IndexNow lets you push changed URLs instantly.

Common mistakes

• Listing non-canonical or redirected URLs.
• Setting lastmod to today's date on every URL, every day.
• A sitemap generated once at launch and never updated.
• Sitemap hosted on a different host without proper cross-submission.
• One giant file for everything, which makes diagnosis hard.

How to test

The Sitemaps report in Search Console shows whether each file was read and how many URLs were discovered. More useful still, filter the Page indexing report by sitemap. If you split sitemaps by template (products, categories, articles) you can see at a glance which page types are struggling to get indexed.

The GEO angle

Bing's index feeds several AI assistants, so a clean sitemap plus IndexNow is one of the quicker ways to get new or updated content in front of them. An accurate lastmod also supports freshness, which matters a great deal in AI retrieval.

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