XML sitemap exists and is valid

A sitemap gives Googlebot, Bingbot, and AI crawlers an explicit inventory of every URL you want indexed along with each page's last-modified timestamp. Without one, discovery relies entirely on internal linking — which fails for deep routes, newly published pages, and orphaned content. On a new site the sitemap is often the difference between a week and two months before the first crawl. It also speeds reindexing: updating lastModified on a page prompts the crawler to revisit, bypassing the standard rediscovery delay.

In Next.js App Router, export a sitemap() function from app/sitemap.ts. Iterate your routes programmatically from your CMS or filesystem — do not hand-maintain the list.

// app/sitemap.ts
export default function sitemap() {
  return [
    { url: 'https://yoursite.com', lastModified: new Date() },
    { url: 'https://yoursite.com/about', lastModified: new Date() },
  ]
}

For other frameworks, generate a static public/sitemap.xml during build. Submit the URL in Google Search Console once to confirm parsing.