Search engines and your sitemap

Search engines find pages by following links, but they find them faster and more completely when a website hands them a list. Your website keeps that list for you. You do not have to ask for it, maintain it, or remember to update it.

Your sitemap

Every website has a sitemap at /sitemap.xml — for example https://your-business.com/sitemap.xml. It is written in the format search engines expect (the sitemaps.org protocol), so Google, Bing, and anything else that reads sitemaps can use it as it is.

The sitemap is rebuilt from scratch every time your website is built, which means it can never fall behind:

• Add a page and it appears in the sitemap.
• Remove a page and it leaves the sitemap.
• Change a page and that page's date moves to today. Pages you did not touch keep the date they already had, so search engines can see what is actually new.

Each entry carries the page's address and the day its content last changed. Pages you have marked Unlisted in Page settings are left out, along with the not-found page, so the list only ever contains pages you want found.

Which address the sitemap uses

A website has two addresses: the free dev address it always answers at, and your own domain once you connect one. The sitemap names your own domain as soon as one is connected, and the free dev address before that.

When you connect a domain — or move to a different one — your website's pages, its sitemap, and its robots.txt are all rewritten to the new address at the same time. Your dev address is never offered to search engines: it answers with a "do not index" rule, because it is a working area rather than the finished website.

robots.txt

robots.txt tells crawlers what they may look at. Your website ships one, and it names your sitemap:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://your-business.com/sitemap.xml

If you ask Max for your own crawl rules — say, to keep a section out of search results — your rules are kept exactly as written, and the Sitemap: line is added below them. If you write your own Sitemap: line, that one is left alone.

Writing your own sitemap instead

You can. Ask Max for a public/sitemap.xml and the file you write is served as-is, in place of the generated one. Doing so takes on the maintenance too: a hand-written sitemap only lists what you put in it, so remember to update it whenever you add or remove a page.

Submitting your sitemap

Nothing here requires you to do anything — search engines check robots.txt on their own and find the sitemap from there. If you want to be quicker about it, add your domain to Google Search Console and submit https://your-domain.com/sitemap.xml directly.

llms.txt, for AI assistants

Your website also has /llms.txt — for example https://your-business.com/llms.txt. It is a short plain-text overview that AI assistants can read instead of crawling every page: your website's name, one line about it, then every page as a link.

# Your Business

> What your business does, in one sentence.

## Pages
- [Home](https://your-business.com/)
- [Services](https://your-business.com/services)
- [Contact](https://your-business.com/contact)

It is rebuilt together with your sitemap, from the same pages and at the same address, so it keeps up with you in the same way: add, remove or rename a page and the list follows. Unlisted pages and the not-found page are left out here too. Each link is named by the page's own title, and the name and the line beneath it come from your website's details — ask Max to change your website's description and the line changes with it. If your website has no description, the line is left out rather than made up. Nothing here uses AI credits.

You can write your own instead: ask Max for a public/llms.txt and it is served as-is, in place of the generated one — but, like a hand-written sitemap, it then only says what you put in it. llms.txt is a young convention; it helps assistants read your website, and does not promise search rankings or mentions.

The other sitemap

There is also a visitor-facing sitemap: a plain page at /sitemap that lists your pages for people rather than for crawlers. That one is a setting you can switch off, and it is described in Site settings. The two are separate: turning the visitor page off does not change sitemap.xml.