Download and Submit Your Sitemap

Downloading Your Sitemap

Once a crawl completes, a Download button appears on your sitemap card in the dashboard. Clicking it saves the sitemap as an XML file named {hostname}-sitemap.xml — for example, example.com-sitemap.xml.

The file follows the standard urlset format and is accepted by all major search engines:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/about</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

To make the sitemap accessible to search engines, upload this file to the root of your web server so it's reachable at https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

Google Search Console

Submitting your sitemap to Google tells Googlebot about your site's structure and speeds up indexing of new and updated pages.

1. Open Google Search Console and sign in with your Google account.
2. Select the property (website) you want to submit the sitemap for. If you haven't verified ownership yet, follow the on-screen verification steps first.
3. In the left sidebar, click Sitemaps (under the Index section).
4. In the Add a new sitemap field, enter sitemap.xml (or the full path if you uploaded it to a subdirectory, e.g. /sitemap.xml).
5. Click Submit.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing has its own webmaster portal and handles sitemap submission separately from Google. The process is similar:

1. Open Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in with a Microsoft account.
2. Add and verify your site if you haven't already. Bing supports verification via XML file, meta tag, or CNAME record.
3. From the left menu, select Sitemaps.
4. Click Submit sitemap and enter the full URL of your sitemap — for example, https://example.com/sitemap.xml.
5. Click Submit. Bing will fetch and process the file, usually within a few hours.

Resubmitting After Changes

Whenever you refresh your sitemap — after publishing new content, restructuring your site, or fixing broken links — it's good practice to resubmit to both search consoles. This signals to search engines that the sitemap has changed and prompts a fresh fetch.

If your sitemap file is hosted at the same URL as before, you don't need to re-enter the URL in Google Search Console — just click Resubmit next to the existing entry. Upload the updated file to your server first.

Common Issues