What pages should you include in an XML sitemap?
A practical guide to choosing which URLs belong in a sitemap and which ones should stay out.
The safest default is to include the pages you genuinely want search systems to discover, crawl, and trust as preferred destinations. That usually means canonical pages that return a clean 200 response, have enough standalone value to deserve indexing, and are still part of the site's real navigation or content strategy. A sitemap works best when it feels curated, not exhaustive.
The pages that usually do not belong in a sitemap are the ones you are already trying to consolidate or de-emphasize: redirects, duplicate parameter URLs, thank-you pages, internal search results, low-value utility pages, blocked URLs, or anything you would hesitate to show as a preferred landing page. If a URL would create confusion in your canonical or internal-linking logic, it probably does not belong in the sitemap either.
A useful test is to ask whether you would feel comfortable if this URL were the version Google stored, revisited, and compared against the rest of your site signals. If the answer is yes, it is probably a sitemap candidate. If the answer is no, leave it out and solve the page's role more directly through canonicals, noindex, redirects, or cleaner site structure.
Use this guide when you want a little more context before publishing, need a quick refresher on best practices, or want to avoid the mistakes that commonly lead to crawl or indexing issues later.
If you want to apply this advice immediately, use the related tool and compare the output against the points covered in this guide.