Which formats work
Google says it accepts three formats and has no preference among them. XML sitemaps are the most versatile. It also accepts RSS and Atom feeds. A text file with one URL on each line is the simplest. A URL is the web address of a page. A sitemap page made for human visitors is a different thing.
Do you need one?
Google lists when a sitemap helps most: when your site is large, when it is new and has few links pointing to it, or when it has a lot of video or image content or appears in Google News. Google says you may not need one if your site is small, which it defines as about 500 pages or fewer, and your pages are all linked from your home page. We read this on 9 October 2026.
What goes inside
- The URL of each page you want in search results.
- Optionally, a lastmod date, which is the date the page was last updated. Google uses lastmod if it is consistently and verifiably accurate. It should show the last significant change to the page, not the day the file was rebuilt.
- Google ignores priority and changefreq values. You will see them in older guides.
Limits and how to share it
One sitemap can hold up to 50MB (uncompressed) or 50,000 URLs. If you have more, split it into several sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index file.
You can tell Google about your sitemap in two ways. Submit it in the Sitemaps report in Search Console. Or add a line such as Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml anywhere in your robots.txt file. Google calls submitting a sitemap a hint, so it may not always download or use it.
A made-up example
A hardware shop's website has 120 pages. Of these, 95 are product and category pages, 5 are service pages, and 20 are test pages, old drafts and thank-you pages.
The sitemap lists the 100 pages the shop wants people to find. It leaves out the 20 others, because only pages you want in search results belong in the file. The shop checks the Sitemaps report in Search Console after a few days for errors.
Common mistakes
- Listing pages that carry a noindex rule. This sends mixed messages.
- Showing a new lastmod date on every page whenever anything changes.
- Forgetting to update the sitemap after a redesign, so it lists old addresses.
- Thinking a sitemap fixes a page Google chose not to index. It does not.
- Spending time on priority and changefreq, which Google ignores.
Related terms
- Indexing: when a search engine stores a page so it can be shown in results.
- Robots.txt: a file that tells crawlers which parts of a site not to fetch.
- Crawl budget: how many pages a search engine will fetch from your site in a given time.
- Canonical tag: a line of code that names the main version of a page.
- Internal linking: links from one page of your site to another.
- Technical SEO (search engine optimisation): the setup work that lets search engines read your site.
To learn how crawling works, read our Googlebot crawling guide. For a full check of your setup, see our SEO work.
Sources
- Google Search Central, "Learn about sitemaps" (developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/overview), read 9 October 2026.
- Google Search Central, "Build and submit a sitemap" (developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap), read 9 October 2026.
