Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file listing a site's important URLs, submitted to search engines to help them discover and prioritize pages for crawling.

A sitemap is a hint, not a guarantee — search engines can and do choose not to crawl or index URLs listed in a sitemap if they judge them low-value, duplicate, or low-quality. It's most useful for large sites, sites with weak internal linking, or newly published pages that need faster discovery, rather than being strictly necessary for every small site to rank.