Sitemap Glossary

What is Yoast SEO Sitemap?

XML sitemaps generated by the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, one of the most popular sitemap generators.

Written by SitemapKit Editorial TeamUpdated: Jul 21, 2026

Key takeaways

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

Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin (12M+ installations) and includes a comprehensive sitemap generator. When enabled, it generates sitemaps at `/sitemap_index.xml` and disables WordPress's built-in sitemap.

Yoast creates separate sitemaps for posts, pages, categories, tags, authors, and custom post types. It also generates specialized sitemaps for images. Each sitemap contains up to 1,000 URLs by default.

Yoast automatically adds the `Sitemap:` directive to the virtual robots.txt and submits sitemaps to search engines via ping. The sitemap settings can be customized through Yoast's admin interface.

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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 Yoast SEO Sitemap.

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