Sitemap Glossary

What is <priority>?

The XML tag that indicates the relative importance of a URL within a site.

Written by SitemapKit Editorial TeamUpdated: Jul 21, 2026

Key takeaways

  • Interpret <priority> in its sitemap XML context; the detailed definition below explains its role and constraints.
  • Validate <priority> against a real XML example instead of relying on the field or tag name alone.

The `<priority>` element is a value between 0.0 and 1.0 that suggests the relative importance of a URL compared to other URLs on the same site. The default value is 0.5.

This tag does NOT affect how a page ranks compared to pages on other sites — it only helps search engines understand which of YOUR pages you consider most important. A homepage might be 1.0, category pages 0.8, and individual posts 0.5.

Like `changefreq`, Google has confirmed they largely ignore this tag. However, it can still be useful for other search engines and for your own analysis of site structure.

XML example

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
  <priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/blog</loc>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

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Sources and further reading

Work with sitemaps programmatically

SitemapKit's API discovers and parses XML sitemaps into structured JSON, including fields such as priority.

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