Sitemaps: list, submit, remove and inspect your sitemaps

See the sitemaps Search Console holds for your property, submit new ones or remove old ones, and bulk-inspect every URL a sitemap lists.

Property → Indexing → Sitemaps3 min read

The Sitemaps page shows the sitemaps Google Search Console has registered for your property, as Google reports them through the Sitemaps API: when each was submitted, when Google last read it, how many URLs it lists and whether it has errors. From the same page you can submit new sitemaps, remove ones you no longer use, and send every URL in a sitemap to bulk inspection.

What the table shows

The cards count your Sitemaps, the Submitted URLs they list, Indexed URLs and Warnings / errors. Index files are left out of the URL totals when individual sitemaps are present, so the same URLs are not counted twice.

Each row shows:

Sitemap and Type: the address, and whether it is a sitemap index or a regular sitemap.
Submitted: the number of URLs Google parsed from it.
Indexed and Indexed share: Google's API has marked its indexed count as deprecated, so these usually stay at zero. Measure indexing with Inspect all URLs instead.
Last submitted and Last read by Google.
Issues: error and warning counts from Google, OK when there are none, and Pending while Google has not processed the sitemap yet.

Search, sort and export the table as with any report. The list holds the sitemaps registered for the property in Search Console; a sitemap Google only knows from your robots.txt may not be listed.

Submit sitemaps

Press Add sitemap, paste one sitemap address per line or load a TXT or CSV file, and press Submit sitemaps. Up to 200 can be sent at once, each must belong to the property, and the result is reported per address: added, rejected by Google (an invalid or unreachable URL), or denied (not enough permission). Submitting changes your Search Console settings, so it needs full access; use Enable full access if the page says your connection is read-only.

Submitting is a request, not a command. Google calls a submitted sitemap a hint that does not guarantee the sitemap will even be downloaded (build and submit a sitemap), and its Sitemaps report help adds that URLs found in a sitemap are not guaranteed to be crawled or indexed.

Remove a sitemap

With full access, each row has a remove button. It deletes the sitemap from Search Console's list after you confirm; it does not touch the file on your server. If the sitemap is also named in your robots.txt, Google can still find it there.

Inspect every URL of a sitemap

Inspect all URLs downloads the sitemap, follows index files, keeps the URLs that belong to the property and runs a bulk URL inspection of up to 500 of them. The results show how many are indexed, how many are excluded and why. Each URL uses one inspection from the property's daily allowance of 2,000, so on large sitemaps inspect a sample rather than everything at once.

Rules worth knowing

A single sitemap may hold up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed; larger sites split them and list the parts in a sitemap index (large sitemaps).
Google ignores <priority> and <changefreq>, and uses <lastmod> only when it is consistently accurate. Update lastmod when the content changes, not on every deploy.
List the canonical URLs you want in search. Redirected, noindex or blocked addresses in a sitemap only produce noise in the reports.

How AutoPSEO helps

Sitemap Performance joins each sitemap with Search Console traffic, so you can see which sections earn clicks. When the content engine delivers articles to your site, add them to your sitemap like any other page; AutoPSEO also notifies IndexNow engines for each delivered article when your site provides a key (delivery).