Manage your sitemaps using the Sitemaps report

Use the Sitemaps report to tell Google about any new sitemaps for your property, to see your sitemap submission history, and to see any errors that Google encountered when parsing your submitted sitemaps.

Open Sitemaps report

 

What is a sitemap? Do I need this report?

A sitemap is a file on your site that tells Google which pages on your site we should know about.

  • If you're using a web hosting service such as Squarespace or Wix, they probably manage your sitemap for you, in which case you don't need to make your own sitemap or use this report. Search your hosting provider for information about sitemaps.
  • If you have a small site (fewer than 100 pages) and you can reach any page on your site by following one or more links from your homepage, you probably don't need a sitemap or this report. In that case, simply request indexing of your homepage (unless you're using a web hosting service, as mentioned previously, in which case you don't need to do anything at all).

Learn more about sitemaps.

Manage your sitemaps

Sitemaps API
You can also use the Search Console Sitemaps API to manage your sitemaps. The API provides all the same functionality and information as this report.

Sitemap crawling schedule

Google will try to crawl a sitemap as soon as you submit it. If the request succeeds, Google will continue to recrawl the sitemap at a pace independent of the site crawl schedule.

If a sitemap fetch or parse fails, Google will continue trying to fetch and process the sitemap for a few days. If the attempts continue to fail, Google will stop trying to crawl that URL. Issues affecting individual URLs within a sitemap won't prevent Google from continuing to read the sitemap, as long as the sitemap can be fetched and read in general.

Reading the report

  1. On the top-level Sitemaps report page, see the status of Google's requests for all sitemaps submitted using this report or the API. The report shows the status of the last request for each sitemap. Each sitemap will have one of the following values, which shows the status of the last request:
    1. Success: The sitemap was fetched and read without any errors.
    2. Couldn't fetch: Google couldn't fetch the sitemap.
    3. Sitemap had X errors: The sitemap could be fetched and partially read, but encountered some errors.
  2. Click into a specific sitemap to see a details page showing information about the sitemap and the request.
    • If the details page says Sitemap could not be read, then the fetch failed for one of these reasons, as shown in the details page. Expand the section below the error to see more details. Try to fix the problem and resubmit the sitemap to the report. If a sitemap fetch fails, Google will try a few more times, but will eventually stop trying to read that sitemap.
    • If the details page says Sitemap can be read, but has errors, you will see a list of errors in the details page for that sitemap. Expand the section below the error to see more details about the error. Read here to learn more about these errors and how to fix them.

Important:

  • This report shows only sitemaps that were submitted using this report or the API. It does not show any sitemaps discovered through a robots.txt reference or other discovery methods. However, even if Google has already discovered a sitemap through other means, you can still submit it using this report in order to track our success and error rates.
  • The report shows only sitemaps that are in the current property. If you're not seeing a sitemap that you expect to, make sure that you're not confusing http/https, or www/non-www properties.
  • If a sitemap cannot be fetched after several attempts, Google will eventually stop trying to read that sitemap. You should fix the errors and resubmit the sitemap.
  • If Google was able to read a sitemap, it will remember that information. A later failure or success to read a sitemap will not cause Google to "forget" the information from previous reads. However, new information about a given URL will overwrite older information about that same URL.
  • You can submit image, video, or news URLs in your sitemap. However, the report doesn't currently show any data for those types of URLs.
  • The report can show a maximum of 1,000 submitted requests. You may submit more, but only 1,000 can be shown here (which are not shown in order of submission). There currently isn't any way to see the additional requests in Search Console.

 

The following information is shown for each sitemap:

Sitemap URL
The exact URL specified when the sitemap was submitted. Redirects are not followed. Only sitemaps submitted using this report or the API are shown here.
Type
The type of sitemap. Possible values:
Submitted
The date when the sitemap was last submitted to Google using this report.
Last read
The last time the sitemap was fetched by Google. Only present if Google could fetch the sitemap.
Status
Status of the latest crawl. Possible values:
  • Success: The sitemap was loaded and processed successfully with no errors. All URLs will be queued for crawling.
  • Has errors: The sitemap could be fetched, but has one or more errors. Any URLs that could be parsed without errors from the sitemap will be queued for crawling. Click the sitemap in the table to see the list of errors with more details. See full parsing error descriptions below.
  • Couldn't fetch: The sitemap could not be fetched for some reason. See how to troubleshoot fetch errors.
Discovered pages
The number of page URLs that were parsed from the sitemap. If this is a sitemap index, the number is the count of all URLs in all child sitemaps. Duplicate URLs are counted only once. There is no guarantee that a page URL discovered in a sitemap has been or will be crawled or indexed by Google. You can filter the Page indexing report by sitemap to see how many page URLs in this sitemap have been indexed.
Discovered videos
The number of video URLs that were parsed from the sitemap. This is no guarantee that these URLs have been or will be crawled or indexed by Google. You can filter the Video page indexing report by sitemap to see how many page URLs in this sitemap have a video that was indexed. Note that Search Console does indicate if a different video URL was indexed on the page than the video URL given in the sitemap. A sitemap listed here will link to the Video page indexing report if it contains any indexed pages that contain any videos when crawled by Google.
See index coverage
Click to open a report showing the index coverage of all URLs in this sitemap. For a sitemap index, it includes all URLs listed in child sitemaps that were already crawled.

 

My sitemap isn't listed!

Here are a few reasons that your sitemap might be not listed in the report:

  • It lives in another property. Sitemaps associated with one property won't be visible in another property. Thus, sitemaps that you've submitted for the site http://example.com won't be visible in the Sitemaps report for http://m.example.com. or https://example.com. To address this issue, make sure that you've added all versions of your site.
  • You didn't submit the sitemap using this report or the API. Only sitemaps submitted using this report or the Search Console API are listed; sitemaps found or submitted using other methods won't be shown, even if Google can find and use them.

Sitemap errors

The following errors are reported by the sitemaps report. This list isn't complete, but it's long enough, and it covers most of the errors you might see.

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