Tutorial · search-console · Published 2026-08-15 · 3 min read
Submitting your sitemap to Google
Submit an XML sitemap to Google in Search Console, read the success or error response, and fix the common submission mistakes.
Prepare the sitemap before you submit it
Submitting a broken sitemap wastes a crawl. Confirm four things first:
- The file is valid XML that matches the sitemap rules: a
<urlset>root with a namespace, plus one<loc>per<url>. - Every
<loc>is the fully qualified http(s) canonical URL, no relative paths and no query strings you do not want crawled. - The file is served at a stable URL and returns 200, not a 404 or a soft-404 page.
- The sitemap URL itself is not blocked by robots.txt. If robots.txt blocks the sitemap, Google's crawler honors the block and the submission reports an error.
A routine check: fetch /sitemap.xml in a browser and confirm it renders as XML rather than as a page error. That single test catches most preparation failures.
Submit it in Search Console
You need the URL of the sitemap file, which normally lives at the site root: https://example.com/sitemap.xml. If your site uses a sitemap index (files that list other sitemaps), submit the index URL, not the child files. Google reads the index and fetches children itself.
- In Search Console open Sitemaps under Indexing.
- Paste the full URL of the sitemap or index into the "Add a new sitemap" field.
- Press Submit.
The sitemap is now discoverable. Do not submit the sitemap to Bing, Yandex, or other engines with the same URL wait; they follow the same protocol, but the reaches are separate, and Bing Webmaster Tools expects its own submission.
Step 2: read the statuses (Success, Error, and the two we treat as errors)
After submission the Sitemaps page shows a status column:
| Status | Meaning | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Success | Google read the file, extracted URLs, and queued them for crawl | None |
| Couldn't fetch | Google could not download the file (server error, wrong URL, blocked) | Fix the delivery, resubmit |
| URL not accepted in 3 sitemaps | The URL scheme is malformed or not allowed | Fix per line below |
| XML parse error | The file is not well-formed XML | Fix the XML, rebuild |
The row also reports the number of URLs found. If that number is 0, the sitemap lists nothing or the file is empty, so fix the file.
The errors you will actually see
- Couldn't fetch: the crawler could not download the file. Usually a wrong URL, an http/https mismatch, or the server returning an error page with a 200. Confirm the URL returns the XML directly.
- URL not acceptable: too long (more than 2048 characters), not absolute, or the file is not in the same host/protocol as the property (an
http://property will not accept anhttps://loc). - Duplicate URL: the same
<loc>twice in the file. Remove the second.
Fix the error in the source, regenerate the sitemap, and resubmit the same URL; Google will overwrite the previous version.
After submission
The delivered sitemap status doesn't change quickly. Check again after a few days, and watch the Pages report and indexing analysis to see whether discovered URLs enter the index. For a page that is simply new and valid, the request indexing route is a one-by-one auxiliary when you need one URL faster.