XML sitemap
<changefreq>
A hint at how often a page changes, drawn from a fixed list of eight values — and ignored by every major search engine.
The permitted values are always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and never, and nothing else. Anything outside that list is invalid against the sitemap schema, though nothing in a normal pipeline will tell you so.
Google has stated it ignores changefreq. It costs bytes and maintenance and buys nothing; the honest advice is to omit it and spend the effort on an accurate <lastmod> instead.
- Format
- XML sitemap
- Namespace
- Sitemap protocol 0.9
- Parent
- <url>
- How many
- At most one per <url>.
What our validator does
We do not check changefreq at all — its value is not read, and an invalid one passes silently.
We do not catch this one
"often" is not one of the eight permitted values, and our sitemap checks say nothing about it — the two documents below are indistinguishable to them. Validating against the sitemaps.org XSD is what catches this, and the enumeration facet is the mechanism.Broken and fixed
Both documents below are well-formed XML — that is the point of this corpus — and both are run through the validator on every test run. The verdicts here are what it returned, not what we expect it to.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
<changefreq>often</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>Where it reaches
- DatatypesenumerationThe facet that turns a list of permitted values into a checkable constraint.
- Schema errorsThe value is not an element of the setThe message a value outside the list produces, once a schema is applied.
- ToolsXSD validatorValidate against the sitemaps.org schema to catch what our sitemap checks do not.
Related elements
- <lastmod>When the page last changed. The one piece of sitemap metadata search engines still act on — and only if you keep it honest.
- <priority>A number from 0.0 to 1.0 expressing a URL's importance relative to others on the same site — also ignored, and routinely misunderstood.
- <url>One entry in a sitemap: a required <loc> plus the optional metadata a crawler may or may not use.
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