How do I submit a sitemap to Google Search Console?

Q: How do I submit a sitemap to Google Search Console?

Open the Sitemaps report, paste your sitemap's URL into Add a new sitemap and click Submit. Then check its status: Success, Has errors or Couldn't fetch.

Open your property in Search Console, go to the Sitemaps report, paste the sitemap's address into Add a new sitemap and click Submit. Google fetches the file straight away and shows a status: Success, Has errors or Couldn't fetch. You need owner permission on the property to submit. Without it, list the sitemap in your robots.txt file instead, which Google reads on its own.

Before you submit

A few minutes of checking avoids most errors:

Open the sitemap URL in a browser and confirm it loads as XML (or plain text) without a login.
Make sure it lives inside the property: a sitemap for https://www.example.com/ must use that protocol and host.
Inspect the sitemap URL with the URL Inspection tool, run a live test, and confirm Page fetch says Successful, as Google's Sitemaps report help recommends.
Check that robots.txt does not block it. Google respects robots.txt when fetching sitemaps.

Don't have a sitemap yet? How do I create a sitemap? comes first.

Step by step

Select the property in Search Console.
Open Sitemaps in the menu, under Indexing.
In Add a new sitemap, enter the sitemap's URL, for example https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.
Click Submit.
Find the sitemap in the list of submitted sitemaps and read its status. Click the row for details if it is anything other than Success.

If your site uses a sitemap index, submit the index; Google reads the files it lists, as its guide to building sitemaps explains. You can also submit several sitemaps separately, which makes it easier to see which section of the site has problems.

What do the statuses mean?

Status	Meaning	What to do
Success	Google loaded and processed the file without errors; its URLs are queued for crawling	Nothing; check back after major changes
Has errors	Google fetched the file but some entries could not be parsed; the valid URLs are still queued	Open the details and fix the listed errors
Couldn't fetch	Google could not download the file at all	See Sitemap could not be read

What happens after submitting?

Google fetches the sitemap right away, but crawling the URLs in it takes longer, and not all of them may be crawled. After a successful fetch, Google rereads the sitemap at its own pace, independent of how often it crawls the rest of the site. Resubmit after you fix an error or make large changes. Deleting a sitemap from the report only removes it from the list: Google does not forget the sitemap or the URLs in it. To keep URLs out of Google, use noindex or remove the pages.

A sitemap is a hint, not a request to index everything in it. For individual pages that matter more than the rest, use Request indexing as well.

Other ways to tell Google about a sitemap

A Sitemap: line in robots.txt, picked up the next time Google crawls that file.
The Search Console API, which can submit sitemaps programmatically.

How AutoPSEO helps

With full Search Console access, AutoPSEO's Sitemaps page submits many sitemap URLs in one go, shows each one's status, warnings and errors, and can bulk-inspect the URLs inside a sitemap to see which ones Google actually indexed. Sitemap Performance then shows the clicks and impressions each sitemap's URLs earn.