What is an XML sitemap, and what is it for?

An XML sitemap is not the "site map" page some stores link in the footer for people, nor the product file you send to Google Merchant Center. It is a file for machines, usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, that tells search engines which URLs in your store you want them to know about. In a catalog with variants, filters and sort orders, which generate many more URLs than you want in a search engine, the sitemap is one of the few places where you say which ones count.

How it works

The format is defined by the sitemaps.org protocol. The file starts with a <urlset> tag that declares the protocol's namespace, and each page goes in a <url> with a required <loc> carrying its address. Three more tags are optional: <lastmod>, the date of last modification in W3C format; <changefreq>, how often it changes; and <priority>, a value from 0.0 to 1.0. The protocol presents them as hints a search engine may disregard.⁠^{[1]sitemaps.org. Sitemaps XML format}

Google is more specific: it ignores <priority> and <changefreq>, and uses <lastmod> only if it is consistently and verifiably accurate. The date has to reflect the last significant change to the page, and Google gives an example of a change that is not: updating the copyright date.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Build and submit a sitemap}

The limits are the same in the protocol and in Google: 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed per file. A larger site splits the list into several sitemaps and gathers them in a sitemap index, which in turn allows up to 50,000 entries.⁠^{[1]sitemaps.org. Sitemaps XML format}⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Build and submit a sitemap} URLs must be fully qualified, with protocol and domain, and the file in UTF-8.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Build and submit a sitemap}

Location has rules too. According to the protocol, a sitemap at /catalog/sitemap.xml can only list URLs that start with /catalog/, and all of them must share the file's protocol and domain.⁠^{[1]sitemaps.org. Sitemaps XML format} Google recommends putting it at the root, where it can affect the whole site.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Build and submit a sitemap}

There are three ways for search engines to find it: submit it in Search Console, add a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt or use the Search Console API.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Build and submit a sitemap} The robots.txt line carries the sitemap's full URL, does not depend on any rule group and can be followed by all crawlers.⁠^{[3]Google Crawling Infrastructure. How Google interprets the robots.txt specification}

The most important part is what the sitemap does not do. Google says it twice: submitting a sitemap is only a hint, which does not guarantee it will download it or use it for crawling,⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Build and submit a sitemap} and there is no guarantee that a URL discovered in a sitemap has been or will be crawled, or that it will pass indexing.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Sitemaps report} Not every site needs one, either. Google recommends it mainly for large sites, with more than 500 pages, for new ones with few external links and for those with a lot of video, images or news; a small, well-linked site may not need it.⁠^{[5]Google Search Central. What is a sitemap}

In a store

Google advises including the URLs you want to see in its results, and reminds you that it tends to show canonical URLs, something the sitemap can influence.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Build and submit a sitemap} In a store that translates into a short, clean list: the canonical URL of every product page and every collection, and not the variants with parameters, the sorted or filtered collections from faceted navigation, internal search results or pages marked noindex.

Shopify generates the file without you doing anything. Every store has a sitemap.xml at the root of the domain that links to separate sitemaps for products, collections, blogs and pages, with each product's main image, and it updates itself when you add content. If you sell in several languages, they are added to each domain's sitemaps. While the store is password-protected, search engines cannot read it.⁠^{[6]Shopify Help Center. Finding and submitting your sitemap}

Here is what the index of a small store and one of its child sitemaps would look like, in a fictional example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example-store.com/sitemap_products_1.xml</loc>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example-store.com/sitemap_collections_1.xml</loc>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example-store.com/products/blue-stoneware-mug</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-28</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example-store.com/products/stoneware-pitcher-1l</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-14</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

What is missing is as deliberate as what is there: no ?variant=, no ?sort_by=, no <priority>, which Google would ignore. And each <lastmod> changes only when something on the page that matters changes, such as the price or the description.

How to check

1. Open yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml in the browser. If it is an index, open each child sitemap and look at what kind of URLs it carries.
2. Open your robots.txt and look for the Sitemap: line, with the full URL.⁠^{[3]Google Crawling Infrastructure. How Google interprets the robots.txt specification}
3. Submit the sitemap in Search Console and look at its status in the sitemaps report, which distinguishes three cases: Google read it without errors, read it with errors or could not download it.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Sitemaps report}
4. Filter the page indexing report by that sitemap to see how many of its URLs are indexed.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Sitemaps report} Read the reasons for the ones that are not in the indexing entry.
5. Review a sample of URLs: they should return a 200, their canonical should be themselves and they should not carry noindex. A URL you do not want in the results has no business in the sitemap.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Build and submit a sitemap}

Related concept: product feed

The sitemap and the product feed get confused because both list the catalog, but they say different things. The sitemap gives addresses: which URLs exist and when they changed. The Google Merchant Center feed gives data: each product with its identifier, title, description, link to its page, main image, availability and price, which Google uses to match your products with the right searches.⁠^{[7]Google Merchant Center Help. Product data specification} A sitemap carries the price of nothing, and a feed does not replace having your product pages be crawlable.

To go further, the comparison puts the sitemap next to llms.txt and structured data, and this topic's reading path puts the rest of the terms in order.