How to add your sitemap to robots.txt

The Sitemap directive is defined in the sitemaps protocol and supported by the major search engines. It is not tied to a user-agent group, so it applies to every crawler wherever it appears. By convention it goes at the end of the file. The URL must be absolute, including protocol and host, and should be the canonical location that returns 200.

If you use a sitemap index, list only the index; search engines follow it to the child sitemaps. Listing both the index and its children is harmless but unnecessary. serionflow.com lists a single sitemap index in robots.txt, which links child sitemaps for each page family.

A robots.txt can reference a sitemap hosted on a different domain, such as a CDN or a dedicated sitemap host. The sitemaps protocol allows this when the robots.txt of the site whose URLs are listed points to it, which proves you control both. Google also accepts cross-site sitemap submission when you have verified both properties in Search Console.

No; do both. robots.txt discovery helps every crawler, including those without webmaster tools. Submitting in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools gives you reporting on when the sitemap was read, how many URLs were discovered, and any errors, and lets you filter the Page indexing report by sitemap. For Bing and other engines that support IndexNow, you can also notify them of changed URLs directly.

Open /robots.txt and confirm the line uses the correct, live URL. Open that URL and confirm it returns XML with a 200 status. If you changed sitemap location, update robots.txt in the same deploy. On WordPress, SEO plugins usually manage the line automatically. Our robots.txt checker and sitemap checker read the live files and flag a missing or broken Sitemap line. SerionFlow is the wrong tool for editing your robots.txt; add the Sitemap line where your file is generated.