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.
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.
- Most-viewed billsWhat people are actually reading on congress.gov this week, as a small, well-behaved RSS feed.
- European Commission press releasesPress releases, statements and speeches from the Commission, with a language parameter that changes the whole feed.
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