A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files. For example, when the page was last updated and any alternate language versions of the page.

To submit a sitemap, or monitor whether Google could read your submitted sitemap, use the Sitemaps report.

Note that the Sitemaps report shows information only about sitemaps submitted using that report. Sitemaps found independently by Google won’t be shown there. However, you can submit a sitemap through the report even if Google already knows about it, in order to be able to monitor Google’s crawl attempts.

The only ways to block a sitemap from being read are to delete the sitemap or block it using robots.txt. To monitor indexed URLs by sitemap, choose a sitemap in the dropdown selector on the Index Coverage report.

Manage your sitemaps using the Sitemaps report

Use the Sitemaps report to tell Google about any new sitemaps for your property, to see your sitemap submission history, and to see any errors that Google encountered when parsing your submitted sitemaps.

OPEN SITEMAPS REPORT

What is a sitemap? Do I need this report?

A sitemap is a file on your site that tells Google which pages on your site we should know about.

• If you’re using a web hosting service such as Squarespace or Wix, they might generate a sitemap for you, in which case you don’t need to use sitemaps or this report. Search your hosting provider for information about sitemaps.
• If you have a small site (fewer than 100 pages) and you can reach any page on your site by following one or more links from your homepage, you don’t need use sitemaps or this report. In that case, simply request indexing of your homepage (unless you’re using a web hosting service, as mentioned previously, in which case you don’t need to do anything at all).

Learn more about sitemaps here.

Managing sitemaps

Submit a sitemap

To submit a new sitemap for crawling:

1. Prerequisites:

• You must have owner permissions for a property in order to submit a sitemap using the Sitemaps report. If you don’t have owner permissions, you can instead reference it from your robots.txt file.
• Note that the report can show a maximum of 1,000 submitted sitemaps. You may submit more, but only 1,000 can be shown here (which are not shown in order of submission). There currently isn’t any way to see the excess sitemaps in Search Console.

2. Post the sitemap on your site.

• The sitemap must use one of the acceptable sitemap formats. Follow the sitemap guidelines for syntax, file location, and so on.
• We recommend putting a sitemap at your site root, but if using a site hosting service (such as Blogger, Wix, or GoDaddy) you should read your service’s documentation to learn where and how to post your sitemap (or if it’s even necessary).
• The sitemap must be accessible to Googlebot, and must not be blocked by any login requirements. You can test if the sitemap is accessible to Googlebot by seeing if you can browse to the sitemap URL in incognito mode.

3. Open the Sitemaps report.
4. Enter the relative URL to the sitemap in the Sitemaps report and click Submit.

The sitemap should be processed immediately. However, it can take some time to crawl the URLs listed in a sitemap, and it is possible that not all URLs in a sitemap will be crawled, depending on the site size, activity, traffic, and so on.

Resubmit a sitemap

You shouldn’t need to resubmit a sitemap that we already know about, even if you’ve changed it. Google will notice any changes the next time we crawl your site.

Delete a sitemap

Deleting a sitemap removes it from this report, but doesn’t make Google forget the sitemap or any URLs listed on it. If you truly need Google to stop visiting the URLs listed in a sitemap you will need to use a robots.txt rule.

To delete a sitemap:

1. In the table on the main Sitemaps report, find and click sitemap that you wish to delete.
2. In the details page for the sitemap, click the more options button
3. Click Remove sitemap.
4. To prevent Google from continuing to visit the sitemap, either use a robots.txt rule to block Google from reading it, or delete the sitemap file from your site.

Reading the report

• This report shows only sitemaps that you submitted using this report or the API. It does not show any sitemaps discovered through a robots.txt reference or other discovery methods. However, even if we already discovered a sitemap through other means, you can still submit it using this report in order to track our success and error rates.
• The report shows only sitemaps that are in the current property.
• You can submit image, video, or news URLs in your sitemap. However, the report doesn’t currently show any data for those types of URLs.

The following information is shown for each sitemap:

Sitemap URL

The URL where the sitemap is posted, relative to the property root.

Type

The type of sitemap. Possible values:

• Sitemap: Sitemap in XML or text format.
• Sitemap index: A sitemap of sitemaps.
• RSS: Sitemap in RSS feed format.
• Atom: Sitemap in Atom feed format.
• Unknown: The submitted file is not a known sitemap type or the sitemap hasn’t been processed yet.

Submitted

The date when the sitemap was last submitted to Google using this report.

Last read

The last time the sitemap was processed by Google.

Status

Status of the submit or crawl. Possible values:

• Success: The sitemap was loaded and processed successfully with no errors. All URLs will be queued for crawling.
• Has errors: The sitemap could be parsed but has one or more errors; any URLs that could be parsed from the sitemap will be queued for crawling. Click the sitemap in the table to see the list of errors. See full error descriptions below.
• Couldn’t fetch: The sitemap could not be fetched for some reason. To learn why not, run a live test on the sitemap with the URL Inspection tool:
  1. Specify the complete path to your sitemap by copying the path prefix from “Add a new sitemap” and add the submitted sitemap’s relative path, for example: https://example.com/sitemaps/mobile/sitemap.txt. Use the values copied from the report in order to guarantee that you are testing the same URL that Google is using.
  2. Click Live test in the URL Inspection tool. This should give you information about whether the sitemap exists and can be fetched by Google.

Discovered URLs

The number of URLs listed in the sitemap. If this is a sitemap index, the number is the count of all URLs in all child sitemaps. Duplicate URLs are counted only once.

Opens a report showing the index coverage of all URLs in this sitemap. For a sitemap index, it includes all URLs listed in any child sitemaps.