How to Submit Your Sitemap in Google Search Console

Why you need to submit your sitemap

Google discovers URLs by following links and reading sitemaps. If your sitemap is not submitted in Search Console, Google has to find your pages on its own — which can take weeks or never happen at all.

GoIndexed reads your sitemap directly from Google Search Console. If no sitemap is submitted, GoIndexed cannot find your URLs and your dashboard will be empty.

How to submit your sitemap

1. Open Google Search Console

   Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with the Google account that owns or has access to your site.

2. Select your property

   In the left sidebar, select the property (site) you want to submit the sitemap for. Make sure you have the right domain selected.

3. Navigate to Sitemaps

   In the left menu, click "Sitemaps" under the Indexing section.

4. Enter your sitemap URL

   In the "Add a new sitemap" field, enter the path to your sitemap. For most sites this is:

   sitemap.xml

5. Click Submit

   Google will fetch and validate your sitemap. Once it shows a green status, GoIndexed will pick up your URLs on the next daily sync.

Where to find your sitemap URL

Most platforms generate a sitemap automatically. Try these common paths first:

• yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml — WordPress, most static site generators
• yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml — WordPress with Yoast or RankMath
• yourdomain.com/sitemap — Shopify
• yourdomain.com/robots.txt — look for a Sitemap: line at the bottom

What happens after you submit

After submitting, Google fetches your sitemap and queues the discovered URLs for crawling. GoIndexed syncs once per day and will show your URLs on the next run.

If your sitemap shows a fetch error in Search Console, check that the URL is publicly accessible and returns a valid XML response.