XML sitemap

A file listing the URLs a site wants search engines to know about, with optional last-modified dates.

A sitemap helps discovery, especially for new, large or poorly interlinked sites. It does not guarantee indexing. Only canonical, indexable URLs belong in it, and lastmod should reflect real content changes — Google ignores lastmod values it finds unreliable.

Sitemaps are submitted in Search Console or referenced from robots.txt. A single file is limited to 50,000 URLs.