An XML file that lists all important URLs on a website for search engines to crawl.
A sitemap.xml file is an XML document placed on a web server that lists the URLs a website owner wants search engines to index. It follows the Sitemaps.org protocol and can include metadata about each URL such as when it was last modified (`lastmod`), how often it changes (`changefreq`), and its relative priority (`priority`).
Most websites place their sitemap at the root: `https://example.com/sitemap.xml`. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex use sitemaps to discover pages more efficiently, especially for large sites or pages that aren't well-linked internally.
The maximum file size for a single sitemap is 50MB (uncompressed) and it can contain up to 50,000 URLs. For larger sites, a sitemap index file is used to reference multiple sitemap files.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2025-01-15</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/about</loc>
<lastmod>2025-01-10</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>SitemapKit's API lets you discover, extract, and parse XML sitemaps from any domain. Get structured JSON data with all sitemap elements including sitemap.xml.