What is XML sitemap?

A file listing a site's URLs so search engines can discover them.

Sitemaps hold up to 50,000 URLs each with optional lastmod dates; large sites use a sitemap index. Accurate lastmod values help search engines recrawl changed pages first.

Related terms

• llms.txt: A Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives AI assistants a curated map of a site.
• Canonical URL: The preferred URL for a page, declared with link rel="canonical".
• hreflang: Annotations that tell search engines which language or region each page version targets.