Sitemaps in the wild
BBC sitemap index
A very small index for a very large site — proof that an index says nothing about the size of what it points at.
Under a kilobyte, naming a handful of children that between them cover one of the largest publishing estates on the web. It is the clearest possible illustration that the index is a table of contents rather than a summary.
Comparing it with the data.gov sitemap — a single urlset thirty times its size — shows the two strategies side by side.
- Publisher
- BBC
- Host
www.bbc.co.uk- Format
- Sitemap index
- Root when listed
- sitemapindex (2026-08-18)
- Size when listed
- 745 B
What the last check saw
Fetched and parsed, 745 B.Checked 2026-08-18 16:03 UTC
Structure
- Root element
sitemapindex- Detected as
- sitemapindex
- Nodes
- 13
- Namespaces
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
/sitemapindex×1/sitemapindex/sitemap×6/sitemapindex/sitemap/loc×6
Recent checks
- ok2026-08-18 16:03 UTC
- ok2026-08-18 16:01 UTC
Get started
Bring order to the XML your team can't afford to ignore.
Create a free account and get a private workspace to search, validate, diff, and monitor your XML feeds, sitemaps, schemas, and vendor integrations.