News Sitemap: Fast Discovery for News Articles
A news sitemap is a specialized XML sitemap for news articles, designed to get breaking and timely stories indexed fast.
News Sitemap is a sitemap for news articles used by Google News.
What It Is
A news sitemap is an XML sitemap built for news articles.
It lists the latest news URLs on your site so Google News can discover and index them quickly.
How It Differs
- It is designed for timely, short-lived news content, not evergreen pages.
- Google News requires it for sites that want to appear in the news tab.
- It only accepts articles published in the last 48 hours.
Why It Matters
- News moves fast, and normal crawling can be too slow.
- It signals to Google that a page is a news article.
- It helps your stories appear in Google News results.
Best Practices
- Only include articles from the last 48 hours.
- Use the news sitemap alongside your regular sitemap.
- Update it whenever a new article publishes.
- Follow Googles news content policies.
Before: a news site publishes breaking stories that take days to be indexed.
After: it adds a news sitemap that is updated with every new article.
The result: stories appear in Google News quickly instead of going stale.
The lesson: for news, speed of discovery is everything.
Quick Tip
A news sitemap is only useful if you actually publish news, so keep it current with articles from the last 48 hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
News Sitemap, in Short
News is only news when it is fresh.
A news sitemap turns a fast story into a fast index.