sitemap
An XML file listing the URLs a site wants search engines and AI crawlers to discover and index.
Definition
A sitemap is an XML file (sitemap.xml or several, with a sitemap-index.xml on top) enumerating the canonical URLs a site exposes, often with last-modified timestamps. Search engines and AI crawlers use it as a discovery shortcut. Modern stacks split sitemaps by content type (posts, pages, tags). Google Search Console reports sitemap submission and indexing status.
When to use
See also
- robots.txt — Plain text file at /robots.txt that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch.
- llms.txt — Plain Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives AI crawlers a curated index of a site's content.