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Shopify generates and maintains sitemap.xml automatically at your domain root. You do not create it, and on most plans you cannot edit it directly.

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What it contains

The root sitemap is an index pointing to sub-sitemaps:
  • sitemap_products_1.xml
  • sitemap_collections_1.xml
  • sitemap_pages_1.xml
  • sitemap_blogs_1.xml
Shopify updates these as you add, change, and remove content. Only canonical, indexable URLs are included — products hidden from the sales channel, and pages set to noindex, are excluded automatically.

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Submit it

In Google Search Console, go to Sitemaps and submit sitemap.xml. Do the same in Bing Webmaster Tools. Submit once. Resubmitting repeatedly does not increase crawl rate and is not a fix for anything.

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Limits worth knowing

  • You cannot exclude individual URLs from the generated sitemap on most plans. Control inclusion by unpublishing from the sales channel or setting noindex in the theme.
  • changefreq and priority values are not used by Google. Adjusting them achieves nothing.
  • Sitemap files cap at 50,000 URLs each; Shopify splits automatically past that.
  • The sitemap is a discovery aid, not an indexing guarantee. Inclusion does not mean a page will be indexed.

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Troubleshooting

“Couldn’t fetch” in Search Console. Usually a password-protected store or a robots.txt rule blocking the sitemap. Confirm the store is publicly accessible and the sitemap loads in an incognito browser. Pages missing from the sitemap. Check the product or page is published to the Online Store sales channel, and that the theme is not applying noindex. Submitted URLs not indexed. Normal to a degree, especially on large catalogues. Persistent large-scale exclusion usually indicates thin content or crawl budget problems rather than a sitemap fault. Sitemap contains URLs that redirect or 404. Shopify should remove these automatically; if they persist, the underlying resource is likely still published somewhere.

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Custom sitemap needs

Shopify Plus allows robots.txt.liquid editing, which lets you reference additional sitemaps — useful when content lives on a subdomain or a separate platform. If your documentation or blog is hosted separately, it has its own sitemap and must be submitted separately.