Put your sitemap at your site root, usually yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. In Google Search Console, open the Sitemaps report, paste the sitemap URL into "Add a new sitemap" and click Submit. In Bing Webmaster Tools, open Sitemaps, click "Submit sitemap", enter the same URL and submit.
Before you submit
You can find your sitemap by adding /sitemap.xml to your domain, and WordPress, Shopify and Squarespace generate one for you. Check it before you hand it over:
- Google recommends putting it at your site root.
- It must be reachable by Googlebot and not behind a login.
- Use full, absolute URLs, not relative ones, and save the file as UTF-8.
- One sitemap holds at most 50MB uncompressed or 50,000 URLs. Past that, split it into several sitemaps.
You need owner permissions on the property to submit. Open the Sitemaps report, paste the sitemap URL into "Add a new sitemap", then click Submit. Google tries to crawl it as soon as you submit, and if the fetch fails it keeps retrying for a few days. The report shows whether it was read.
Bing
If you build with Claude Code or Codex, Shipfound adds a missing sitemap by pull request and submits it in your own Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a sitemap for a small site?
What happens if I delete a sitemap in Search Console?
It leaves the report, but Google won't forget the sitemap or the URLs in it.
What about Yahoo and Ask?
Yahoo Site Explorer was replaced by Bing Webmaster Tools, and Ask.com no longer accepts sitemap submissions.
Does a sitemap get me into ChatGPT and Perplexity?
It helps their crawlers find your pages, if you let them in. See how to get indexed by PerplexityBot and GPTBot.