How to Submit a Sitemap to Google Search Console

The three ways, and when each is right

Google accepts sitemap submissions through the Search Console Sitemaps report, through the Search Console API, and through a Sitemap line in robots.txt. Its documentation notes there is no limit on how many sitemaps you reference.

Do the robots.txt line regardless. It is one line, it applies to every crawler rather than only Google, and it removes the guesswork for anything that did not read your Search Console account. The format is simply the word Sitemap, a colon, and the full absolute URL.

Then submit in Search Console as well, because that is what gives you feedback. The robots.txt line makes the sitemap findable; the Search Console submission tells you whether Google actually fetched it and what it thought of the contents.

The API only matters if you are managing many properties programmatically.

• robots.txt: one line, works for every crawler, no account needed
• Search Console: gives you fetch status and error reporting
• Search Console API: for managing many sites programmatically

What the statuses mean

Search Console reports a status and a discovered-URL count, and both are commonly misread.

Success means the file was fetched and parsed. It does not mean the URLs inside were indexed, and the two get conflated constantly. A sitemap can show Success while almost nothing in it is indexed.

Couldn't fetch means Google could not retrieve the file at all: a network problem, a block, or a URL that does not resolve. Couldn't read means it was fetched but did not parse, which very often means HTML was served instead of XML.

The discovered-URL count is how many URLs Google found listed in the file. Compare it to how many pages you believe you have. A large gap in either direction is informative: too high suggests old or parameter URLs are being published, too low suggests something is filtering pages out.

Submitting is a hint, not a command

This is the expectation that most needs setting, and Google states it directly: "Submitting a sitemap is merely a hint: it doesn't guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on the site."

So submission is not a lever you can pull to get indexed. It makes discovery easier and it gives you a diagnostic surface. Whether a given page gets crawled and indexed depends on whether Google judges it worth the effort, which is a question about the page and the site rather than about the sitemap.

The practical consequence: if pages in your sitemap are not being indexed, resubmitting will not help. The problem is upstream, in the pages or in how your own site treats them.

After you submit

Check back in a few days rather than a few minutes. Fetching is not instant and repeatedly resubmitting achieves nothing.

Then compare the discovered count against the Pages report. If the sitemap lists 300 URLs and the Pages report shows 40 indexed, you have an indexing question to investigate, and the sitemap has done its job by making that gap visible.

Leave the submission in place. There is no need to resubmit when you publish, because Google re-fetches known sitemaps on its own schedule.

Common questions