XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a structured file that provides search engines and AI crawlers with a complete list of URLs on your website that you want indexed. It includes metadata like last modification date, change frequency, and priority to help crawlers understand which pages are most important.

XML sitemaps are essential for large websites, new websites, and sites with complex architectures where internal linking alone may not ensure all pages are discovered. They also help AI crawlers efficiently index your content for training and retrieval purposes.

Best practices include keeping sitemaps under 50,000 URLs and 50MB, using sitemap indexes for large sites, automatically updating modification dates when content changes, excluding noindex pages, and submitting sitemaps through Google Search Console and other webmaster tools.