XML sitemap

<video:video>

A video on a page: thumbnail, title, description and a location, with the strictest required-child list of any sitemap extension.

<video:video> requires four children — <video:thumbnail_loc>, <video:title>, <video:description> and one of <video:content_loc> or <video:player_loc>. Miss any of them and the entry is dropped rather than partially indexed.

The remaining children are optional and numerous: duration, expiration and publication dates, rating, view count, family-friendly flag, platform and live status. Their value constraints are real — a duration outside 1 to 28,800 seconds is rejected — but nothing in an ordinary pipeline checks them.

Format: XML sitemap
Namespace: Google video sitemap extension
Parent: <url>
How many: Any number per <url>.

What it contains

video:thumbnail_locrequiredImage URL for the poster frame.
video:titlerequired
video:descriptionrequiredAt most 2,048 characters.
video:content_locone of these twoThe media file itself.
video:player_locone of these twoA player URL.

Cardinality and constraints

Any number per <url>.

Requires xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1" on the root.
All four required children, or the entry is ignored entirely.
<video:duration> is in seconds and must be between 1 and 28,800.

What our validator does

Not inspected. The required-child rules here are Google's, and enforcing them is Search Console's job rather than ours.

We do not catch this one

There is no thumbnail and no description, so two of the four required children are missing and the video will not be indexed. Neither document below produces an issue from our checks.

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"
        xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/watch</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
    <video:video>
      <video:title>Hen lays egg</video:title>
      <video:content_loc>https://example.com/hen.mp4</video:content_loc>
    </video:video>
  </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"
        xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/watch</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
    <video:video>
      <video:thumbnail_loc>https://example.com/hen.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
      <video:title>Hen lays egg</video:title>
      <video:description>A hen lays an egg.</video:description>
      <video:content_loc>https://example.com/hen.mp4</video:content_loc>
    </video:video>
  </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

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.

Get started free Sign in