Definition

A sitemap is a file — most commonly an XML file at `/sitemap.xml` — that lists URLs on a site along with optional metadata such as last-modified dates, helping search engines find and prioritise pages for crawling.

Google says a sitemap is most useful for large sites, sites with isolated pages that have few internal links, sites with rich media (video, images, news), or new sites with few external links. A sitemap is a hint, not a directive: listing a URL does not guarantee Google will crawl or index it. Sitemaps can be submitted in Search Console or referenced from `robots.txt`.

Examples

• Submitting a sitemap

  An e-commerce site generates `/sitemap.xml` listing all 12,000 product URLs, then references it in `robots.txt` and submits the URL in Search Console. Google uses the sitemap to discover newly added products faster than it would by following links alone.

• Sitemap index for a large site

  A news publisher splits its sitemap by year because a single sitemap cannot exceed 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed. The site links each yearly sitemap from a parent sitemap-index file.

Sources

• Google Search Central — Build and submit a sitemap
• Google Search Central — Sitemaps overview

Related terms

• Crawl Budget
  The number of URLs a search engine crawler will fetch and the rate at which it fetches them on a given site.
• Indexing
  The process by which a search engine analyses a fetched page and stores information about it so the page can later be returned in search results.
• robots.txt
  A plain-text file at the root of a domain that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not request.

Where QueryCatch uses this

• Sitemap Optimisation
• SEO Audit