How to submit a sitemap in Google Search Console
A sitemap tells Google which URLs you want crawled. Submitting it in Search Console lets you see whether Google could read it and how many of its URLs are indexed.
Step by step
- 1Open your property and go to Indexing → Sitemaps.
- 2Under "Add a new sitemap", type the sitemap path (for example sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml).
- 3Click Submit. The status should change to "Success" once Google fetches it.
- 4Click the sitemap to see how many URLs were discovered, and open the Pages report filtered by that sitemap to see which are indexed.
Good to know
- List only canonical, indexable URLs that return 200 — no redirects, noindex or 404s.
- Also reference the sitemap in robots.txt with a "Sitemap:" line, so every search engine finds it.
- A sitemap index can list up to 50,000 sitemaps; each sitemap up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB.
- "Couldn't fetch" usually means the URL is wrong, blocked by robots.txt or returns an error.
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More Search Console guides
- How to request indexing of a page in Google Search Console
- How to remove a URL from Google search results
- How to add a user to Google Search Console
- How to verify a domain property in Google Search Console (DNS)
- How to use regex filters in Google Search Console
- How to compare two date ranges in Google Search Console
- Indexing errors explained