How to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console

1. Find your sitemap URL

Most platforms create a sitemap for you. Try these addresses on your own domain:

Open the URL in your browser. You should see XML listing your pages, or a sitemap index that links to several smaller sitemaps.

• Check your sitemap with the free sitemap checkerValidates the XML and flags duplicate, invalid and cross-host URLs.

2. Submit it in Search Console

1. Sign in to Google Search Console and select your property.
2. Open Indexing → Sitemaps in the left menu.
3. Enter the sitemap URL under Add a new sitemap and choose Submit.

You need owner permission on the property to submit. Google fetches the sitemap right away, but crawling the URLs in it takes longer, and not every URL is guaranteed to be crawled or indexed.

If you use a sitemap index, submitting the index is enough. Google reads the sitemaps it links to.

3. Check the status

No owner access? Use robots.txt

Add a line with your sitemap’s full URL anywhere in robots.txt. Google and other search engines read it the next time they fetch the file:

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

Google stopped supporting the old sitemap ping URL in 2023. Use the Sitemaps report or robots.txt instead.

What makes a good sitemap

• List only canonical URLs that return 200 and that you want in Google. Leave out redirects, noindex pages and duplicates.
• Keep each file under 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Split larger sites into several sitemaps with a sitemap index.
• Use lastmod only when it reflects a real change to the page. Google uses it when it’s consistently accurate.
• Google ignores priority and changefreq, so you don’t need to tune them.

Check your sitemaps from your AI assistant

HyperGSC can’t submit sitemaps, because its Google access is read-only. With it connected, ChatGPT, Claude, Codex or Cursor can review your submitted sitemaps and their errors on paid plans. The free sitemap health diagnostic checks a sample of sitemap URLs on any plan.

Use HyperGSC for [my property]. List my submitted sitemaps with their last download date, errors and warnings, then check a sample of URLs from the main sitemap for redirects, noindex or errors.