← All terms

sitemap.xml

An XML file listing your site's URLs so crawlers discover every page, even ones nothing links to.

sitemap.xml is a machine-readable list of the URLs on your site, each with optional metadata like last-modified date and change frequency. It helps search and AI crawlers find pages they might otherwise miss and understand how fresh each one is.

Generate it, don't hand-write it

A static sitemap rots the moment you add a route. The durable pattern is a generated sitemap route that enumerates your real pages on every build, and a link to it from robots.txt so crawlers find it.

sitemap.xml — Glossary