How to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console

Before you submit

Find your sitemap's URL. Most platforms create one for you:

If you're not sure, look it up instead of guessing:

The guide to finding a sitemap covers the less obvious places. If your site has no sitemap at all, the XML Sitemap Generator crawls it and builds one ready to upload to your site's root.

Check it's worth submitting. A sitemap should list only the URLs you want in search: pages that return 200, aren't redirects, aren't noindex and are their own canonical. Pull the URLs out with the Sitemap URL Extractor and run them through the Indexability Checker. Google's limits are 50,000 URLs and 50 MB (uncompressed) per sitemap file; bigger sites split their URLs into several sitemaps listed in a sitemap index.

Verify the site in Search Console. You can only submit sitemaps for a property you own. A Domain property covers every subdomain and protocol; a URL-prefix property only covers URLs under that exact prefix, so the sitemap must sit within it.

Submit it in Search Console

1. Open Google Search Console and pick the property.
2. In the left menu, go to Indexing → Sitemaps.
3. Under Add a new sitemap, enter the sitemap's path, such as sitemap.xml, or the full URL for a Domain property.
4. Click Submit.

If you use a sitemap index, submit just the index. Google reads the sitemaps listed in it, and each appears in the report.

What the status means

"Success" means the file was read, not that every URL in it will be indexed. A sitemap is a hint about which URLs exist and matter; Google still decides what to crawl and index.

Fixing "Couldn't fetch"

Work through these in order:

1. Open the exact URL you submitted in a private browser window. A typo, a missing www, or http instead of https is the most common cause.
2. Check the status code. It must return 200 directly. Paste it into the Bulk HTTP Status Code Checker; a redirect, 403 or 404 shows up there.
3. Check robots.txt doesn't block it. Test the sitemap URL in the Robots.txt Tester.
4. Check it's really XML. Some setups return an HTML page, a login screen or a JavaScript-rendered page at the sitemap URL. The Sitemap URL Extractor reports when a file isn't a valid sitemap.
5. Check firewalls and bot protection. Security plugins, Cloudflare rules and hosting firewalls sometimes block Googlebot. Allow verified Googlebot traffic.
6. Resubmit. If everything above passes and the status doesn't change, wait a few days. A newly submitted sitemap can show "Couldn't fetch" until Google's first fetch has happened.

Other ways to tell search engines

robots.txt. Add a Sitemap line with the full URL. Google and Bing both read it, and it works for crawlers where you have no account:

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

The Search Console API can submit sitemaps from code, which suits sites that publish many sitemaps.

Bing. Submit the sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools under Sitemaps, or import your sites and sitemaps from Google Search Console when you sign up. Bing also supports IndexNow, a protocol for notifying search engines about changed URLs as they happen.

Ping URLs no longer work. Google retired its sitemap ping endpoint in 2023, and requests to it now return a 404. Old plugins and scripts that still ping do nothing; use Search Console, the API or robots.txt instead.

After submitting

• Watch the Page indexing report, filtered to the sitemap, to see which submitted URLs are indexed and the reasons the rest aren't. Guides to each reason: Crawled – currently not indexed, Discovered – currently not indexed and Page with redirect.
• Keep lastmod honest. Google uses it when it's consistently accurate, meaning the date of the last meaningful change to the page. Google ignores priority and changefreq.
• No need to resubmit each time the sitemap changes. Google refetches known sitemaps on its own; resubmitting is only useful after fixing an error.

Questions