Updated July 19, 2026

sitemap.xml tags reference

A sitemap.xml lists the URLs a search engine should know about. This sheet covers the URL-level tags, the sitemap-index tags for large sites, and the format rules that keep a sitemap valid.

URL sitemap tags

Namespace: http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 on the <urlset> root.

Tag	Required	Purpose
`<urlset>`	Yes	Root element; carries the sitemaps.org namespace.
`<url>`	Yes	One entry per page. Wraps the tags below.
`<loc>`	Yes	The full, absolute URL of the page. Must be under 2,048 characters.
`<lastmod>`	No	Last modification date in W3C format (YYYY-MM-DD). Google uses it when consistent.
`<changefreq>`	No	Hint: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never. Largely ignored by Google.
`<priority>`	No	Hint from 0.0 to 1.0 (default 0.5). Largely ignored by Google.

Sitemap index tags (for large sites)

Tag	Purpose
`<sitemapindex>`	Root element of an index that points to other sitemaps.
`<sitemap>`	One entry per child sitemap.
`<loc>`	Absolute URL of a child sitemap file.

Example

A URL sitemap and, below, a sitemap index that lists two.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-07-19</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-1.xml</loc>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-2.xml</loc>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Size limitsA single sitemap may contain at most 50,000 URLs and be at most 50 MB uncompressed. Split larger sets across multiple sitemaps and reference them from a sitemap index. Sitemaps may be gzip-compressed.

Point crawlers to itList the sitemap URL in robots.txt (Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml) and submit it in Search Console. Use only canonical, indexable, absolute URLs.

References

Questions

Which sitemap tags are required?

Only <urlset>, <url>, and <loc>. <lastmod>, <changefreq>, and <priority> are optional, and Google now relies mainly on <lastmod>.

How many URLs can one sitemap hold?

Up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Beyond that, split into multiple sitemaps and list them in a <sitemapindex> file.

What date format does <lastmod> use?

W3C datetime — commonly YYYY-MM-DD, or a full timestamp like 2026-07-19T10:30:00+00:00.