What is an XML sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a structured text file that lists every URL on a website you want search engines to discover. It follows the open Sitemap protocol at sitemaps.org and uses XML tags — <loc>, <lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority> — to describe each page. Google, Bing and other crawlers read the file to find URLs faster than they would by following links alone. A single XML sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed; bigger sites use a sitemap-index that references multiple child sitemaps. When you 'convert an XML sitemap to CSV', you're flattening the XML tree into rows so you can analyze, audit or pipe the URLs into other tools.