How to submit a sitemap to Google and Bing

Almost every platform generates one for you. Try these addresses in a browser before you build anything.

• yourproduct.com/sitemap.xml, the convention and the first thing to try.
• yourproduct.com/sitemap_index.xml, what several CMS plugins produce.
• yourproduct.com/robots.txt, which usually declares the sitemap on a Sitemap: line.
• Your framework's route: a sitemap file in the app for Next.js and Nuxt, an integration for Astro, a plugin for WordPress, automatic on Shopify, Squarespace, Webflow and Ghost.

What you should see is XML listing your URLs, each with a lastmod date. If you see the home page only, or a page of 404s, fix the file before submitting it.

1. 1

   Verify the property first

   Search Console shows nothing for a site it does not know you own. A Domain property, verified by a DNS record, covers every subdomain and both protocols and is the right default.

2. 2

   Open Sitemaps

   In the left menu under Indexing. The box asks for the path after your domain, so type sitemap.xml, not the whole address.

3. 3

   Submit, then leave it

   The status is often pending for a few minutes to a few hours. Refreshing does not make Google read it sooner.

4. 4

   Declare it in robots.txt as well

   A Sitemap: line with the full URL. It costs nothing and is how every other crawler finds the file.

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://yourproduct.com/sitemap.xml

Bing's index answers Bing, Microsoft Copilot, Yahoo Search and part of DuckDuckGo. It is worth the ten minutes, and the setup is shorter than Google's.

1. 1

   Import from Search Console

   Bing Webmaster Tools offers a one-click import of a site already verified in Google Search Console, which brings the verification and the sitemaps with it.

2. 2

   Or verify directly

   An XML file, a meta tag or a DNS CNAME, if you would rather not connect the two accounts.

3. 3

   Add the sitemap

   The Sitemaps section takes the full URL of the file.

4. 4

   Turn on IndexNow for new pages

   IndexNow pushes a URL to Bing the moment it changes, and is honoured by Yandex, Naver and Seznam too. Many platforms and CDNs have a switch for it; otherwise it is one API call in your deploy.

The report also shows the date it was last read and the number of URLs discovered. That count is what Google found in the file, not what it indexed. The gap between the two lives in the Page indexing report.

• Only canonical URLs. One entry per page, in the form you link to internally.
• Only URLs that answer 200. Redirects, 404s and noindexed pages in a sitemap are a contradiction: you are asking for indexing and refusing it at the same time.
• An accurate lastmod, or none at all. Google reads lastmod when a site is consistently honest about it, and ignores it otherwise.
• Nothing in changefreq or priority. Google ignores both.
• Up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed per file. Past that, split the file and list the parts in a sitemap index.

A sitemap helps discovery. That is all it does, and it is worth having for exactly that reason.

• It does not make Google index a page. Indexing is a judgement about the page, not about the file that mentioned it.
• It does not rank anything, and no priority value has ever changed a position.
• It does not replace links. A page listed in the sitemap and linked from nowhere is still a page nobody points at, and it ranks accordingly.
• It does not fix a page blocked by robots.txt or carrying a noindex tag. Those beat the sitemap every time.

A finished setup looks like this: one sitemap at a stable address, listing only canonical URLs that answer 200, declared in robots.txt, submitted in both tools, reporting Success, with the count of discovered URLs close to the number of pages you meant to publish.