What is sitemap.xml

In short

A sitemap is a map of your site for search engines. It says: here are the pages I consider important. Thanks to it, Google does not have to wait until it stumbles on an article through a menu, an internal link, or another site.

Why it matters for Articlero

When Articlero generates an article, it is not enough that the article exists. Google has to find it, crawl it, and evaluate it. If new articles do not make it into the sitemap, growth can be slower and the results may not match what you expect from the content.

What should be right

• The sitemap exists, for example at /sitemap.xml.
• It contains full absolute URLs, not relative paths.
• It includes generated articles after publishing.
• It is listed in robots.txt or submitted in Google Search Console.

How to set it up

1. 1Enable the sitemap in your CMS or SEO plugin.
2. 2Verify the sitemap contains articles, not just static pages.
3. 3Add its address to robots.txt with a Sitemap line.
4. 4Ideally submit it in Google Search Console too.
5. 5In Articlero, check how many generated articles are missing from the sitemap.

Common mistakes

• The sitemap exists but does not contain blog articles.
• The sitemap has old or redirected URLs.
• The URLs in the sitemap are not the canonical versions of the pages.
• The sitemap is blocked by robots.txt or returns an error.

What Articlero checks

The audit compares generated articles with the URLs Articlero found in the sitemap. When something is missing, we recommend fixing publishing or the CMS setup.

A simple example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://your-site.com/blog/article-title</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-04-26</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Sources