XML sitemap: create, submit and check

What is an XML sitemap?

A sitemap describes the pages, videos and other files of a site, and the relationships between them (Google, Learn about sitemaps, December 10, 2025). The XML format follows the sitemaps.org protocol, shared by Google, Bing and the other major search engines.

The XML sitemap is meant for crawlers. The HTML site map, on the other hand, is a navigation page for visitors. The two can coexist, but they do not play the same role.

Does your site need an XML sitemap?

Google recommends one in three cases. The site has more than about 500 pages. It is new and still receives few external links. Or it publishes a lot of videos, images or news. Conversely, a small site with good internal linking can do without one: Googlebot finds its pages through links.

What does an XML sitemap look like?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.exemple.fr/seo/robots-txt-seo/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-24</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.exemple.fr/seo/budget-crawl/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-18</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Each URL is described in a <url> block. The protocol provides four tags, which Google does not all treat the same way.

Tag	Status	What Google does
<loc>	Required	Crawls the URL exactly as written: it must be absolute, with the protocol
<lastmod>	Optional	Uses it if the date is consistently accurate and verifiable
<changefreq>	Optional	Ignores it
<priority>	Optional	Ignores it

Google says it bluntly: “Google ignores <priority> and <changefreq> values” (Build and submit a sitemap, July 8, 2026). There is therefore no point in weighting your pages with priority. This value affects neither crawling nor ranking in Google.

The same page sets the technical limits: 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed per file. Encoding is UTF-8 and URLs are absolute. Beyond that, you split into several files grouped by a sitemap index.

The lastmod date: useful if it tells the truth

In June 2023, Google reminded site owners that lastmod helps it schedule its crawls (Google Search Central, June 2023). The date must be in the right format and consistently accurate. If it changes on every load, or for a simple copyright update, Google stops relying on it. Change it when the main content, structured data or links change.

Which URLs should you put in your XML sitemap?

The sitemap is a list of recommendations. Each URL must be one you want to see in the results.

• URLs that respond with 200, without redirects;
• canonical URLs: no parameter variants, no duplicates (see the canonical URL);
• indexable URLs: no noindex pages;
• crawlable URLs: no pages blocked by robots.txt;
• URLs from the same site as the sitemap, unless cross-site submission is set up in Search Console.

A sitemap that mixes these cases blurs the signal and skews the Search Console report. On a large site, it also wastes crawl budget.

Extensions exist for images, videos and Google News. They help Google find media it would not otherwise discover (Google, image sitemaps, December 10, 2025). This is the case for images loaded with JavaScript. The language versions of a page can also be declared there with hreflang annotations.

How do you create an XML sitemap?

On a site managed with a CMS, the sitemap is generated automatically. It is updated with each publication. This is the right option in almost every case: a hand-written file quickly goes out of date.

Situation	Method	Checkpoint
WordPress without an SEO plugin	Native sitemap since version 5.5: index at /wp-sitemap.xml, 2,000 URLs per file by default (WordPress Core, July 22, 2020)	Check that useless content types (authors, tags) are not included
WordPress with Yoast SEO	Index at /sitemap_index.xml; noindexed content types are excluded	Declare a single sitemap, the plugin’s, in Search Console and robots.txt
Static or custom-built site	Generation script at deployment, or export from a crawl (Screaming Frog) filtered on indexable URLs returning 200	Regenerate at every release

How do you submit an XML sitemap to Google?

1. Declare it in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line followed by the absolute URL. Search engines that read robots.txt will find it this way (see our article on the robots.txt file).
2. Submit it in Search Console, Sitemaps report, to track how it is processed (see our Google Search Console guide).
3. Let the CMS keep it up to date: Google rereads known sitemaps regularly, without a new submission.

For Bing and other search engines, the IndexNow protocol reports a URL at the very moment it changes. A submission can contain up to 10,000 URLs. As of September 24, 2026, its official participants are Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, Internet Archive and Amazonbot. Google is not among them. IndexNow complements the sitemap; it does not replace it.

How do you read the Sitemaps report in Search Console?

For each submitted file, the report shows a status. It can be “Success”, “Couldn’t fetch” or a number of errors. A fetched file is only a start: the number of discovered URLs does not tell you how many are indexed.

To find out, open the Page indexing report and filter it by sitemap. Look at the URLs marked “Crawled – currently not indexed” or “Discovered – currently not indexed”. In a clean sitemap, they point to a quality or internal linking problem, not a sitemap problem. Internal linking remains the first way to get a page discovered and valued.

One last point: removing a sitemap from the report does not make Google forget its URLs. To remove pages, you have to act on the pages themselves (404, 410, noindex, redirect).

The XML sitemap is one of the building blocks of technical SEO. It is simple to set up, but only useful if it stays clean.