A single sitemap can hold at most 50,000 URLs. Larger sites split their URLs across several sitemap files and tie them together with a sitemap index — a sitemap of sitemaps. You submit the one index file, and search engines fan out to fetch the rest.
What an index looks like
An index uses
<sitemapindex>
instead of
<urlset>,
and each entry points at a child sitemap rather than a page:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>https://example.com/sitemap-pages.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2026-06-21</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>https://example.com/sitemap-products.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2026-06-20</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>How to split your URLs
- By section — e.g. one sitemap for blog posts, one for products, one for static pages. This makes it easy to see which area has indexing problems.
- By count — simply chunk every 50,000 URLs into the next file.
- By freshness — keep frequently-changing URLs in their own file so its
lastmodupdates often.
Limits apply to the index too
A sitemap index can list up to 50,000 child sitemaps and must itself stay under the 50 MB ceiling. If you ever exceed that, you can nest — though almost no site is large enough to need it.
Keep reading
Sitemap size and URL limits
The 50,000-URL and 50 MB ceilings every sitemap must respect, and what to do when you outgrow them.
What is an XML sitemap?
How the XML sitemap protocol works, what each tag means, and why search engines rely on it to crawl your site.
Submitting your sitemap to search engines
Where to put your sitemap and how to hand it to Google and Bing so your pages get discovered faster.
HTML sitemaps explained
The human-facing cousin of the XML sitemap: a single page that links to everything, helping both visitors and crawlers.