Search Console Sitemap Submission
A sitemap tells Google which URLs exist on a site. Submitting it takes a minute; reading the status correctly is what saves time later.
On this page
A sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs on a site so search engines can discover them. It helps discovery, but it does not guarantee indexing or ranking. Google's documentation calls submitting a sitemap "merely a hint: it doesn't guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on the site."
Where to find the sitemap on common platforms
Most platforms generate a sitemap automatically, so there is usually nothing to build by hand:
- Blogger serves one at
/sitemap.xml(for examplehttps://example.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml), and its default robots.txt already points to it. - WordPress core publishes a sitemap index at
/wp-sitemap.xml, with up to 2,000 entries per sitemap by default. It is switched off when "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is checked. SEO plugins often replace it with their own sitemap at a different URL, so check the plugin's settings before submitting.
The sitemap limits are 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed per file. A larger site splits its URLs across several sitemaps and lists them in a sitemap index file, and submitting the index is enough.
Submit it in Search Console
Only owners of a verified property can submit a sitemap, and the report shows only sitemaps within the current property, so http and https or www and non-www versions count as different URL-prefix properties. Then:
- Open the sitemap URL in a browser, or test it with URL Inspection, to confirm it loads.
- Open the Sitemaps report in the Indexing section of Search Console.
- Paste the full URL into the Add a new sitemap box and click Submit.
Google also reads a sitemap listed in robots.txt. The line takes a fully qualified URL, for example Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml. Blogger and the WordPress core robots.txt add this line on their own. Menu names in Search Console can change.
Reading the status
The Sitemaps report shows the submission date, the last read date and a status:
- Success: the sitemap was fetched and read without errors.
- Has errors: the file was fetched but some entries could not be parsed; URLs that parsed correctly are still queued for crawling.
- Couldn't fetch: Google could not retrieve the file.
- Unknown: the file is not a known sitemap type or has not been processed yet.
For "Couldn't fetch", start at the sitemap URL itself: it should return the XML with a 200 status, without a login, a redirect to another host or a robots.txt block, and it must belong to the property it was submitted in. A sitemap status says nothing about indexing; for that, use the Page indexing report.
