Encyclopedia / SEO & GEO

Sitemap

A list of every URL you want found.

sitemap.xml lists your canonical URLs with optional lastmod dates. Submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Keep it accurate: only list pages that return 200, aren't noindexed and use canonical URLs.

<url>
  <loc>https://ada.example/work/atlas</loc>
  <lastmod>2026-10-01</lastmod>
</url>

Related terms

robots.txt Search Console Canonical URL

Where it shows up in a page load

  1. Step 11: Meanwhile: the crawlers. Googlebot and AI crawlers make the same trip. They read robots.txt and the sitemap, fetch each page and read the head (title, description, canonical, structured data) and the content. That is everything search results and AI answers have to work with, so SEO and GEO start with the website itself.

Watch the full request journey →

More in SEO & GEO

How search engines and AI systems find, read and describe the site.

Title tag Meta description Canonical URL Robots meta / noindex robots.txt Open Graph & social cards Structured data (JSON-LD) Core Web Vitals Internal links Backlinks Search Console GEO (generative engine optimization) llms.txt

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