Government and public sector
GOV.UK sitemap index
A textbook sitemap index: a short file pointing at the child sitemaps that carry the actual URLs, and small enough to read in full.
This is the shape the protocol intends at scale, and it is small enough to read in full — which makes it the best possible example of a sitemap index for anyone who has only ever seen a urlset.
Each child it names is itself a sitemap, and the lastmod on each child is what lets a crawler skip one entirely.
- Publisher
- Government Digital Service
- Host
www.gov.uk- Format
- Sitemap index
- Root when listed
- sitemapindex (2026-08-18)
- Size when listed
- 4.6 KB
What the last check saw
Fetched and parsed, 4.6 KB.Checked 2026-08-18 16:03 UTC
Structure
- Root element
sitemapindex- Detected as
- sitemapindex
- Nodes
- 106
- Namespaces
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
/sitemapindex×1/sitemapindex/sitemap×35/sitemapindex/sitemap/loc×35/sitemapindex/sitemap/lastmod×35
Recent checks
- ok2026-08-18 16:03 UTC
- ok2026-08-18 16:01 UTC
Where it reaches
- FormatsSitemap indexThe format page for indexes.
- ToolsSitemap validatorDetects which of the two you gave it and checks accordingly.
Also in this category
- New UK legislation feedEvery piece of UK legislation as it is published, as an Atom feed — with the legislation itself available as XML behind each entry.
- Federal Register documentsRules, proposed rules and notices from US federal agencies, published continuously as RSS — the form most monitoring pipelines actually consume.
- Most-viewed billsWhat people are actually reading on congress.gov this week, as a small, well-behaved RSS feed — small enough to read whole rather than sample.
- European Commission press releasesPress releases, statements and speeches from the Commission, with a language parameter that changes the whole feed.
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