How to Submit a Sitemap to Google and Bing
Submitting a sitemap tells search engines exactly which pages you want indexed — and helps them find those pages faster than waiting for Googlebot to discover them naturally. It takes 10 minutes and can speed up indexing by days or weeks. Here's the exact process.
Generate your XML sitemap
Your sitemap should list every page you want indexed with its last-modified date. If you're on WordPress, a plugin handles this automatically. For custom sites, generate it programmatically or use an online sitemap generator for small sites.
Rank Math generates a dynamic XML sitemap in WordPress and updates it automatically every time you publish — no manual regeneration needed. Seobility's audit verifies your sitemap is correctly formatted.
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Submit to Google Search Console
Log into Google Search Console, select your property, and click 'Sitemaps' in the left nav. Enter your sitemap URL in the 'Add a new sitemap' field and click Submit. Google will show the submission status and how many URLs it discovered.
Rank Math's Search Console integration shows sitemap status directly in your WordPress dashboard. SE Ranking's site audit verifies that your submitted sitemap is being crawled and processed correctly.
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Submit to Bing Webmaster Tools
Most SEOs skip Bing and leave traffic on the table — Bing powers DuckDuckGo and Yahoo search too. Go to webmaster.bing.com, verify your site via XML file or meta tag, then submit your sitemap URL in the Sitemaps section.
Semrush's Site Audit checks Bing crawlability alongside Google — flagging pages blocked from Bing but not Google. Most tools only focus on Google, so this is a useful edge.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Fix common sitemap errors
Common sitemap problems: including 4xx pages, listing URLs that are canonicalized to a different page, including noindex pages, or having a sitemap over 50MB/50,000 URLs (split into a sitemap index in this case). Your Search Console report will flag these.
Semrush's Site Audit includes a dedicated sitemap health check — it validates your sitemap format, cross-checks submitted URLs against crawl data, and flags URLs that shouldn't be in the sitemap.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)