Practical sitemap guides
Find your sitemap, submit it to search engines and diagnose common errors. Step-by-step guides connected to the tools you can use.
How to Find the Sitemap of a Website
Before generating a new sitemap, check whether your website already publishes one. An existing sitemap maintained by your CMS is usually the best starting point. Here is how to find its actual address and confirm what it contains.
Open the canonical website domain followed by /robots.txt. Look for a line starting with Sitemap: and copy the full address after it. A site can declare several sitemap files, including files hosted on another domain. Open each declared address rather than assuming the sitemap lives at the root.
- 1. Start with robots.txt
- 2. Check common sitemap addresses
- 3. Find WordPress and Shopify sitemaps
- 4. Distinguish a sitemap from a sitemap index
- 5. If you cannot find a sitemap
How to Submit a Sitemap to Google and Bing
Submitting a sitemap tells a search engine where to retrieve a file on your website. You submit the public URL, not an XML attachment. The same valid sitemap can be used by Google and Bing; submission does not guarantee indexing.
Find the sitemap produced by your CMS, or generate an XML file and publish it on your website. For a simple setup, place it at the site root. Open the exact final URL without logging in and check that it returns the intended XML rather than an error, redirect chain or security challenge. Review canonical page URLs and remove accidental duplicates, broken entries or pages you intentionally exclude from search. If the entry point is a sitemap index, check that its referenced child files are also accessible.
- 1. Publish and check the file first
- 2. Submit the URL in Google Search Console
- 3. Submit it in Bing Webmaster Tools
- 4. Declare the sitemap in robots.txt
- 5. Maintain the sitemap after submission
Sitemap Could Not Be Read: Causes and Fixes
An unreadable sitemap needs a diagnosis before a replacement. First determine whether Google cannot retrieve the file or retrieved it but found parsing errors. A file that opens in your browser is useful evidence, but does not prove that Google received the same response.
Open Sitemaps, select the affected submission and expand the error details. Record the exact URL, status and last read date. “Couldn’t fetch” concerns retrieving the sitemap; parsing errors concern the file’s contents. Do not treat either as proof that every listed page has disappeared from the index. Some fetch failures are temporary or related to low crawl demand. If your checks show a healthy file, compare later processing attempts instead of endlessly rewriting XML.
- 1. Read the detailed Search Console error
- 2. Check the final URL and HTTP response
- 3. Validate the XML and child files
- 4. Check what Google can retrieve
- 5. Separate XML errors from page exclusions
- 6. Recheck and resubmit after the fix