XML format
XML sitemap
A list of a site's URLs with optional freshness hints, read by every major search engine. One <urlset> root, one <url> per page, <loc> mandatory.
A sitemap is the simplest useful XML document most teams operate: a <urlset> root containing one <url> per page, each with a mandatory <loc>. Everything else — lastmod, changefreq, priority — is a hint, and search engines weight them very differently.
Because it is generated rather than hand-written, a sitemap fails in generated ways: a routing change silently drops a whole section, a build stamps every lastmod with the deploy time, or pagination pushes the file past a hard limit. None of those are XML errors, so validation alone will not catch them.
- At most 50,000 <url> entries and 50 MB uncompressed per file; split into a sitemap index beyond that.
- <loc> must be absolute, fully qualified, and entity-escaped — a raw & in a query string makes the file malformed.
- All URLs in one sitemap must share the host that serves the sitemap, unless cross-submission is configured.
- lastmod must be W3C Datetime; stamping it with the build time trains crawlers to ignore it.
- hreflang alternates require the XHTML namespace and an xhtml:link per alternate, on every URL in the set.
- Root element
<urlset>- Media type
application/xml- Extensions
.xml, .xml.gz- Namespaces
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
- XMLDir label
sitemap
Specification: sitemaps.org protocol
A minimal valid document
Every example on this site is checked against the same parser the workspace uses, so what you see below is known to be well-formed.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2026-07-20</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>Namespaces you will meet
Sitemap protocol 0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9The namespace every sitemap.xml and sitemap index must declare, almost always as the default. Declare the https:// form and crawlers reject the file.
XHTML
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtmlXHTML markup — and, in sitemaps, the namespace that carries <xhtml:link> hreflang alternates, which is why stripping it destroys hreflang coverage.
Google image sitemap extension
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1Declares the images belonging to each <url> entry in a sitemap, so a crawler can associate them with the page that hosts them without parsing it.
Google news sitemap extension
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9Publication name, language and publication date for news articles in a sitemap — the one sitemap type where a stale file is worse than no file.
Google video sitemap extension
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1Thumbnail, duration, player and content locations for video in a sitemap. Several child elements are required together, or the entry is dropped.
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