XML Sitemap

A machine-readable file listing a site's URLs so crawlers and agents can discover every page without following links.

The sitemap is a Discovery-dimension signal in the Agent-Readiness Audit; a complete, canonical sitemap is the lowest-cost way to make your whole surface discoverable to agents.

term
XML Sitemap
category
optimization
short_def
A machine-readable file listing a site's URLs so crawlers and agents can discover every page without following links.
long_def
An XML sitemap enumerates a site's canonical URLs (optionally with last-modified dates and priorities) at /sitemap.xml, giving crawlers a complete, authoritative index instead of relying on link discovery. For agents, it is the fast path to the full surface area of a site — a discovery affordance alongside llms.txt and robots.txt.
see_also
llms-txt robots-txt ai-crawler
etymology_origin
— verify-against-primary-at-build ↗ https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html — Sitemaps protocol introduced by Google in 2005, now an open standard
related_to
llms-txt robots-txt ai-crawler content-negotiation
contrast_with
Unlike robots.txt, which states what may be crawled, a sitemap states what exists — the enumerated list of pages an agent can retrieve.
example
An agent that reads /sitemap.xml learns every page of a site in one request, instead of crawling link by link.
source
https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
status
active
why_it_matters
The sitemap is a Discovery-dimension signal in the Agent-Readiness Audit; a complete, canonical sitemap is the lowest-cost way to make your whole surface discoverable to agents.
sameAs
https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
bridge_entity
llms-txt
last_verified
2026-07-06
md_twin
/glossary/sitemap.md

last verified · by

← all The Agentic Web Lexicon · .md · JSON