XML Sitemaps: What Google Does With Yours, With Examples, Limits and Generators

What a sitemap earns you, and what it never will

Google's sitemaps overview defines a sitemap as a file that gives it information about the pages, videos and other files on a site and how they relate. In practice it does three jobs: it helps Google find URLs it might not reach through links, it tells Google when pages changed, and it carries extra detail about images, video, news and language versions. Bing goes further in its July 2025 guidance, calling sitemaps a foundational signal for URL coverage across its search and Copilot experiences, while adding that no tool can guarantee how content appears in AI answers.

Who can live without one

Google names three kinds of site that benefit most: large ones, new ones with few external links, and those heavy with video, images or news. It also says a site may not need one if it is small (roughly 500 pages or fewer), every important page is linked internally, and it carries few media or news files. A twelve-page site for a pest control company, with every page in the menu, gains little. Most platforms generate a sitemap anyway, so the real question is rarely whether you have one. It is whether yours is telling the truth.

A sitemap file, tag by tag

A minimal XML sitemap is shorter than most people expect. It opens with an XML declaration, wraps everything in one urlset element that declares the sitemaps.org namespace, and gives each page a url entry holding its address in loc and, optionally, a lastmod date. That is the entire required vocabulary. Everything else is an extension or a tag Google skips.

Three house rules from Google's guide to building a sitemap: save the file as UTF-8, use absolute URLs, and list only the canonical version of each page. Place it at the root, because unless you submit it in Search Console, a sitemap covers only URLs in its own directory and below. Google also dropped the caption, title, geo location and license image tags from its documentation, so a plugin still writing them is wasting bytes. Language alternates are covered in our international SEO guide, and which version counts as canonical in our canonical tags guide.

Three formats, and the numbers that cap each file

• A single sitemap holds 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed, whichever comes first. Compressing it with gzip saves bandwidth, but the limit applies to the uncompressed size.
• A sitemap index file may list up to 50,000 sitemaps. It cannot list other index files.
• Search Console accepts up to 500 sitemap index files for each site.
• A Google News sitemap may carry up to 1,000 news entries and should list only articles published in the last two days.
• WordPress core caps each of its sitemaps at 2,000 URLs by default, a number a developer can change with a filter.

Nobody running a local business site will meet these ceilings. A store with 80,000 product variants, each on its own URL, will hit the first one, and the ecommerce SEO section deals with whether all those variant URLs should exist at all.

lastmod is the one date Google checks your work on

Google says it uses lastmod only when the value is consistently and verifiably accurate, for example when it matches the page's real last change. It counts a change to the main content, the structured data or the links as significant. A new copyright year in the footer does not count. Bing's guidance lines up: the date should reflect when the content changed, not when the sitemap file was generated, preferably as a full ISO 8601 timestamp with the time included.

Now the comedy. The Next.js documentation's own sitemap example sets lastModified to new Date(), which stamps every URL with the second the file was built. Paste that into production and you tell Google every page on the site changed today, and again tomorrow. Plenty of plugins and online generators do the equivalent. Google learns your dates are noise and stops reading them, which is exactly backward for the day you really do rewrite the pricing page.

Index files: split the list so it tells you something

A sitemap index looks like a sitemap of sitemaps. It uses a sitemapindex element instead of urlset, and each entry holds the loc of one child sitemap plus an optional lastmod for when that file changed. Google's large sitemap documentation requires the child files to live on the same site as the index and in the same directory or lower, unless you have set up cross-site submission in Search Console.

Here is the practical reason to split even a modest site. Search Console lets you filter the Page indexing report by sitemap, so separate files for service pages, location pages, blog posts and products turn one vague number into a diagnosis. Say your services sitemap is fully indexed and your locations sitemap is half indexed. The location pages are the problem, and they are probably thin or near-duplicates, which our guide to programmatic SEO explains. One undivided file would only have told you something, somewhere, is wrong.

Where your platform already keeps a sitemap

Google says the best way to make a sitemap is to let your website software generate it, and most software does. Before you buy or build anything, look for the file your platform already writes.

Free online generators that crawl your site once produce a snapshot, and a snapshot goes stale the afternoon you add a page. Google itself links to a list of third-party generators that it describes as old and unmaintained. A sitemap that writes itself from your content is the only kind that stays honest without someone remembering to redo it.

Submitting it, and the ping that stopped answering

1. 1

   Open the file yourself

   Load the sitemap URL in a browser. It should show XML, list your canonical protocol and hostname, and contain no addresses you would be embarrassed to rank.

2. 2

   Name it in robots.txt

   Add a Sitemap line with the full URL. Google picks it up the next time it crawls robots.txt, and it works even for people without Search Console access.

3. 3

   Submit it in Search Console

   In the Sitemaps report, paste the URL and submit. You need owner permission on the property. Remember that http, https, www and bare-domain variants are separate URL-prefix properties; our Search Console guide explains why a Domain property avoids that.

4. 4

   Give Bing the same file

   Submit it in Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing pairs sitemaps, for full coverage, with IndexNow, which notifies participating engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted.

5. 5

   Read the status

   Success, Has errors or Couldn't fetch. If it is anything but Success, our guide to XML sitemap errors walks through each failure.

6. 6

   Come back in a few weeks

   Filter the Page indexing report by that sitemap and compare indexed pages with submitted ones. The gap is your to-do list.

Two old habits to drop. Google retired its sitemap ping endpoint, announced in June 2023; requests to it now return a 404, and a plugin still pinging does no harm and no good. And deleting a sitemap in Search Console only removes it from the report. Google does not forget the sitemap or its URLs; to stop crawling, block or remove the pages themselves. If a submitted file keeps failing to load, Google retries for a few days, then gives up.

Keeping the list honest after launch

A sitemap goes wrong quietly. A redesign renames URLs and the old ones linger, a plugin adds tag archives, someone noindexes a page and the generator keeps listing it. Each entry Google fetches that redirects or refuses indexing teaches it to trust the list a little less. Check the file monthly as part of routine SEO maintenance, and after any website migration, confirm that every listed URL returns a 200 and that redirects are not hiding inside it.

If the sitemap is clean and pages still are not indexed, the file was never the blocker; our fix for a site not indexed by Google and the technical SEO checklist cover the rest, and sites built in JavaScript should also read JavaScript SEO. Or hand it off. Our free website audit emails a PDF of SEO, speed, mobile, security and content fixes, and sitemap hygiene is routine technical work in our SEO programs. The SEO guide shows where it sits among everything else.