What Is an XML Sitemap? (And How to Submit Yours)

An XML sitemap is the list of pages you are formally asking search engines to crawl.It is not a ranking factor and it does not force indexing — it is a discovery mechanism, and a statement of intent: these URLs, and only these, are the ones I stand behind. Most sites have one automatically; most also quietly fill it with URLs that should not be there.

What an XML sitemap looks like

Underneath the mystique it is a plain XML file: a list of <url> entries, each with a location and usually a last-modified date.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-01</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/services/roof-repair/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-07-24</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Large sites split this across multiple sitemaps behind a sitemap index(a sitemap of sitemaps) — typically one per content type: posts, pages, products, categories, images. That structure is not just for size limits; it makes indexing problems diagnosable, because Search Console reports coverage per sitemap. If your product sitemap shows 40% indexed while pages show 98%, you have just localised the problem.

How to find and submit yours

1. Find it: visit /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. If neither loads, check robots.txt for a Sitemap: line.
2. Verify the contents — this is the step everyone skips. Spot-check ten URLs: do they all return 200, and would you want every one indexed?
3. Submit in Search Console → Sitemaps → enter the path → Submit. Once is enough.
4. Add the robots.txt line so every crawler finds it, not just Google (see the robots.txt guide).
5. Check coverage after a week in Search Console: submitted versus indexed tells you whether your URLs are being accepted.

The mistakes that waste it

• Noindexed URLs in the sitemap — you are asking Google to crawl pages you told it to ignore. Contradictory signals; Ahrefs and Search Console both flag it.
• Redirected or 404 URLs — stale entries from a migration, still being crawled months later.
• Canonicalised duplicates listed as originals — see duplicate content and canonicals.
• Missing images or video — image and video sitemaps are how that media gets discovered for their own search verticals.
• Never updating lastmod — or worse, setting every page to today, which trains crawlers to ignore the field entirely.
• Multiple competing sitemaps — WordPress core, an SEO plugin, and a cache plugin each generating one, all submitted, all disagreeing.

A sitemap is one of three crawl signals working together — the others are robots.txt and your internal links. Check all three at once with the free audit.