XML sitemap

<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.

Priority is relative within one site, never across sites, and it does not affect ranking. The default is 0.5. Setting every URL to 1.0 conveys exactly as much as setting none of them, which is the most common way it is used.

Like changefreq, Google has said it ignores this element. It remains in the protocol, and a value outside the 0.0–1.0 range is still invalid against the schema even though nothing in a typical pipeline complains.

Format: XML sitemap
Namespace: Sitemap protocol 0.9
Parent: <url>
How many: At most one per <url>.

What it contains

Nothing — this element holds a value rather than other elements. Its content is text, and the constraints below are what that text has to be.

Cardinality and constraints

At most one per <url>.

A decimal between 0.0 and 1.0 inclusive. The default when absent is 0.5.
Relative to other URLs on the same site only. It has no cross-site meaning and no ranking effect.
Setting everything to 1.0 is the same as setting nothing.

What our validator does

We do not check priority — the value is not read, so one outside the permitted range passes silently.

We do not catch this one

10 is ten times the maximum, and our sitemap checks do not look at the value. A schema validation against the sitemaps.org XSD reports it as outside the permitted range; nothing else will.

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.

broken

<?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>
    <priority>10</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

No issue reported. This defect passes our checks.

fixed

<?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>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

No errors. Warnings may remain — a conforming feed can still be missing a self link — but nothing here is wrong.

Where it reaches

Related elements

All 34 elements

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