Fix · Discovery

There is no sitemap, or it lists almost nothing

Search engines find your pages by following links and by reading a list you give them. Without the list, new and changed pages are found later, or not at all.

What we found

No XML sitemap — the request for /sitemap.xml answered with an error, and robots.txt declares no other location. Evidence EV-039

The sitemap lists almost nothing — a sitemap exists but carries only the homepage, or pages that no longer exist. Evidence EV-039

Why it matters

A sitemap is a plain list of the addresses you want indexed, with the date each one last changed. Google reads the date "if it's consistently and verifiably accurate" and uses it to decide what to recrawl. Bing reads the same file. For a site with a dozen pages and a strong menu, the gain is modest: faster discovery of new pages, and a way to see in Search Console which of your pages Google knows about. For a larger site, or one whose pages are not all linked from the menu, it is the difference between being found and not.

The repair, in four steps

  1. Generate the file. WordPress (Yoast, Rank Math, or core since 5.5), Shopify, Squarespace and Wix all produce one automatically; find its address in your platform's help. A static site can write one at build time, or by hand for a handful of pages.
  2. Keep it honest. Only pages that return 200 and are meant to be indexed. No redirects, no pages marked noindex, no drafts. Set lastmod to the date the content last changed, not today's date on every build; a date that is always "now" is ignored.
  3. Declare it in robots.txt with one line: Sitemap: https://yourbusiness.co.uk/sitemap.xml. That is how a crawler that has never visited finds it.
  4. Submit it in Google Search Console (Sitemaps report) and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both then show you when it was last read and how many of its addresses are indexed. Bing and several other engines also accept IndexNow pings for changed pages; Google does not take part in IndexNow.

Before and after

Now

# robots.txt
User-agent: *
Allow: /
<!-- /sitemap.xml: 404 -->

After

# robots.txt
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://yourbusiness.co.uk/sitemap.xml

<!-- /sitemap.xml -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url><loc>https://yourbusiness.co.uk/</loc>
       <lastmod>2026-09-15</lastmod></url>
  <url><loc>https://yourbusiness.co.uk/opening-hours</loc>
       <lastmod>2026-09-02</lastmod></url>
</urlset>

Limits, for the record: 50,000 addresses or 50 MB uncompressed per file. A site that large uses an index file pointing at several sitemaps. A site with 30 pages does not need to think about this.

Prove it worked. Open /sitemap.xml in a browser: it loads, every address in it returns 200, and none carries noindex. Open robots.txt: the Sitemap line is there. In Search Console, the Sitemaps report shows "Success" with a discovered-URL count that matches the file. Do not use a site: search as the test; its count is neither complete nor stable.

What it will not do

A sitemap tells an engine where your pages are. It does not make them rank, and it does not get a page indexed that the engine has decided is thin or duplicate. "Discovered, currently not indexed" in Search Console after a sitemap is submitted is a content question, not a sitemap question.

Sources: Google Search Central, "Build and submit a sitemap" (limits, lastmod, robots.txt declaration, Search Console submission); IndexNow documentation (participating engines).