Sitemap discovery
An XML sitemap is a canonical inventory of URLs a site would like crawlers to know about.
How it works
Crawlers may fetch the sitemap from robots.txt, a remembered location, or a webmaster tool. The sitemap is a hint: inclusion does not guarantee fetching or indexing.
How to validate it
Use absolute canonical URLs, accurate last-modified dates, and a cohort that has no other discovery route; observe sitemap and page requests as separate events.
Common failure
Listing duplicates, redirects, blocked URLs, and non-canonical variants creates ambiguous signals and spends crawl attention on low-value addresses.
Machine-readable editions
The same article is available as Markdown and JSON. These alternates are linked here but are not submitted through the sitemap or IndexNow.