How to submit a sitemap to Google

Before you start

• A generated XML sitemap
• Search Console access, ideally verified by DNS

The steps

1. 1

   Step 1: Confirm the sitemap loads

   Open yourdomain.com/sitemap-index.xml in a browser. If it 404s, nothing else will work.

2. 2

   Step 2: Check its contents

   Every URL should be canonical, indexable and return 200. No redirects, no noindex pages, no 404s.

3. 3

   Step 3: Verify in Search Console

   Add the property and verify by DNS record — that survives redesigns and supplier changes.

4. 4

   Step 4: Open the Sitemaps report

   Left menu → Indexing → Sitemaps.

5. 5

   Step 5: Enter the path and submit

   Just the path after the domain, such as sitemap-index.xml.

6. 6

   Step 6: Reference it from robots.txt

   Add a Sitemap: line with the absolute URL, so any crawler finds it without being told.

7. 7

   Step 7: Submit to Bing too

   Bing Webmaster Tools imports from Search Console in one step, and its index feeds Copilot.

What submitting does and does not do

It helps discovery of URLs that might otherwise be hard to reach. It does not make anything rank, and it will not rescue a page nothing internally links to — which is the usual reason a submitted URL sits at "Discovered — currently not indexed".

Do not resubmit repeatedly

Resubmitting the same file after a few days changes nothing. If pages are not being indexed, the answer is in internal linking and page quality, not in the sitemap report.

Reading the sitemap report afterwards

It reports discovered URLs, not indexed ones, and the two numbers are routinely different. A sitemap showing 200 discovered against 40 indexed is not a sitemap problem — it is a quality or internal-linking problem that the sitemap has usefully exposed. Use the Pages report to see the reason Google gives for each exclusion, because those reasons are specific and actionable.

The background behind this

XML sitemaps: useful, misunderstood, and no substitute for links covers the reasoning in about 2 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.