How to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console

Publish the sitemap on your site, open the Sitemaps report in Google Search Console, paste the sitemap URL into the "Add a new sitemap" box and click Submit. Google tries to fetch the file right away. Submitting only tells Google where the file is: it does not guarantee that any URL in it is crawled or indexed.

Before you submit

• The file must be online at a public URL, ideally at the site root, such as https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. A sitemap can only list URLs under its own path, protocol and host.
• You need owner permission on the Search Console property to use the report. Without it, list the sitemap in robots.txt instead (below).
• Open the URL in a browser. You should see XML. The free sitemap validator checks the format and the limits for you.

Step by step

1. Open the Sitemaps report for your property in Search Console.
2. Optional but useful: inspect the sitemap URL with the URL Inspection tool and run a live test. "Page fetch" should read Successful. If it does not, fix that first.
3. In "Add a new sitemap", enter the sitemap address. The box already shows your property, so you type only the part after it, such as sitemap.xml.
4. Click Submit. The sitemap appears in the "Submitted sitemaps" table with a status.
5. If the status is not Success, click the row to see the error details.

The report lists only the sitemaps submitted through Search Console or its API. Google describes the steps in the Sitemaps report help page.

Submit through robots.txt as well

A Sitemap: line in robots.txt works without owner permission and is also how other search engines can find the file. Use the full URL. The line does not belong to any user agent group, and you can list more than one sitemap. See Google's robots.txt specification.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Make sure no Disallow rule blocks the sitemap file. The robots.txt tester shows whether a URL is allowed. Google retired its old sitemap "ping" request in 2023, so Search Console and robots.txt are the two ways to tell it.

What the statuses mean

• Success. Google fetched the sitemap and read it with no errors. Its URLs are queued for crawling.
• Has errors. Google fetched the file but found errors. The URLs it could parse are still queued. Open the row to see the list.
• Couldn't fetch. Google could not retrieve the file. The guide on this error lists the causes.

Crawling the listed URLs takes longer than fetching the file, and not all of them may be crawled. A fresh submission often shows few discovered pages at first. Do not resubmit every day: Google rereads a known sitemap on its own, and a correct lastmod helps it notice what changed.

If something goes wrong

For "Couldn't fetch", read Sitemap could not be read: causes and fixes. For every other message in the report, the Search Console sitemap errors guide gives the cause and the fix.