Video sitemaps explained

A video sitemap describes the videos hosted on your pages so search engines can index them and show rich previews — a thumbnail, a duration, sometimes a play button right in the results. Video players are often built with JavaScript and embeds that crawlers cannot fully read, so spelling out the details helps.

What you describe

Like image entries, video entries live inside a regular XML sitemap, under the video namespace. Each entry attaches to the page the video appears on:

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/talks/intro</loc>
  <video:video>
    <video:thumbnail_loc>https://example.com/thumb.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
    <video:title>An introduction to sitemaps</video:title>
    <video:description>A five-minute primer.</video:description>
    <video:content_loc>https://example.com/talks/intro.mp4</video:content_loc>
    <video:duration>312</video:duration>
  </video:video>
</url>

The required pieces

• thumbnail_loc — a representative image for the video.
• title — a clear, descriptive title (it should match the title on the page).
• description — a short summary of what the video covers.
• Plus a way to reach the video itself — either a content_loc (the raw file) or a player_loc (the embed player).

Optional tags like duration, publication date and rating give search engines more to display and can make your result stand out.