XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file, usually at /sitemap.xml, that lists the pages of a website you want search engines to crawl and index. Large sites often split it into several files, joined by a sitemap index.

Search engines discover the sitemap directly or through a Sitemap: line in robots.txt, and use it to find new and updated pages faster than crawling alone. Most content management systems can generate one automatically. Including a page's canonical URL in the sitemap also acts as a weak signal for which version of duplicate content search engines should treat as authoritative.

Find out more

• Sitemaps XML format - the protocol specification
• robots.txt
• Canonical URL