An XML sitemap is a hint to search engines about which URLs matter and when they were last updated. It does not guarantee indexing, but it accelerates discovery on large or poorly linked sites.
Requirements
- Only include URLs that return a 200 status.
- Only include canonical, indexable URLs — never noindex or redirect URLs.
- Keep each file under 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed.
- Reference the sitemap from robots.txt and submit it in Search Console.
Example
An e-commerce site publishes a sitemap index file that links to five child sitemaps — products, categories, blog posts, static pages, and images — each updated nightly.
How SEM Optimiser reports it
The audit compares sitemap contents against crawled URLs and flags any URL that is either missing from the sitemap or present but non-indexable.
Related terms
- robots.txt
robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a domain that instructs crawlers which paths they are allowed or disallowed to fetch.
- Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs Googlebot can and will crawl on a website within a given time frame, determined by crawl capacity and crawl demand.
- Index Coverage
Index coverage is the report in Google Search Console that shows which URLs on a site are indexed, which are excluded, and why.
- Canonical Tag
A canonical tag is a link element that tells search engines which URL is the preferred version when the same or similar content appears at multiple URLs.