XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a structured XML file that lists the URLs on your website, providing search engines with a roadmap for discovering and prioritizing content for crawling.
XML sitemaps follow the sitemaps.org protocol. Each sitemap can contain up to 50,000 URLs and must be under 50MB uncompressed. Larger sites use a sitemap index file that references multiple sitemap files.
Include only canonical, indexable URLs in your sitemap. Do not include URLs that return 4xx/5xx errors, are blocked by robots.txt, have noindex tags, or redirect to other URLs. The `<lastmod>` tag should reflect actual content changes, not be auto-updated on every deploy.
Submit your sitemap via Google Search Console and reference it in robots.txt. Next.js generates sitemaps via `app/sitemap.ts` — Indxel validates that all sitemap URLs are accessible and return 200 status codes.
Related terms
Sitemap XML
An XML sitemap is a file that lists URLs on your website along with optional metadata (last modified date, change frequency, priority) to help search engines discover and crawl your pages.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website that instructs search engine crawlers which URLs they are allowed or disallowed from accessing.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs Googlebot will crawl on your site within a given period, determined by crawl rate limit (server capacity) and crawl demand (page importance).
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