XML Sitemap

A machine-readable list of the URLs on a site that its owner wants crawled.

Also known as sitemap.xml. Updated September 7, 2026.

What it means

It is how pages nothing links to yet get discovered at all. A new page with no inbound links and no sitemap entry is invisible until something happens to point at it.

The part a short definition leaves out

Publishing a sitemap and declaring it in robots.txt are two separate steps and both matter. A sitemap nobody knows about only helps the crawlers that guess the conventional filename. Declare it explicitly.

Where this comes from

sitemaps.org protocol

Related terms

robots.txt A plain text file at the site root telling crawlers which parts of the site they may request.
Internal Link A link from one page of a site to another, present in the HTML response rather than added by script.
Discovery Signal Anything observable that affects whether a machine can reach a page at all, before any question of quality comes up.

See whether this is costing you anything

The inspection reports on this signal directly, alongside thirty-seven others, and tells you whether it is a quick fix on your site or something deeper.

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