XML sitemap: A file that lists the addresses on a site you want search engines to know about. WordPress has generated one at /wp-sitemap.xml since version 5.5; SEO plugins usually replace it with their own.
Which sitemap does your site have?
Since WordPress 5.5, core builds a sitemap index at /wp-sitemap.xml, with up to 2,000 URLs in each child sitemap by default, and turns it off when “Discourage search engines” is ticked. SEO plugins often replace it. Yoast SEO disables the core sitemaps in favour of its own, and Rank Math serves its sitemap index at /sitemap_index.xml. Open both addresses on your site to see which one is live before you submit anything, and submit only that one.
What a sitemap does and doesn’t do
A sitemap helps discovery. Google says it is most useful for large sites, new sites with few external links, and sites with lots of media, and that a site of about 500 pages or fewer that is well linked internally may not need one. It also says, in its sitemaps overview, that listing a URL does not guarantee it will be crawled or indexed.
A sitemap is not a substitute for links. It tells Google a page exists, not that it matters or how it relates to your other pages. A recipe that is only in the sitemap is an orphan page with a postcode but no road leading to it. Being listed in a sitemap is also one of the signals Google weighs when it picks a canonical URL, so list only the version of each page you want shown.
What to check
- Submit the sitemap index in Search Console under Indexing › Sitemaps and look for errors.
- Leave out pages you have set to noindex, redirected URLs and thin archive pages. In Rank Math this is under Rank Math SEO › Sitemap Settings, per post type and taxonomy.
- Use it as an audit input: compare the sitemap with a link crawl to find pages that are listed but never linked, as the step-by-step orphan page hunt shows.