A news sitemap is an XML sitemap with extra details for news articles. It contains only recent articles from a publication and points Google News to new content.
Structure and rules
Each entry needs a news:news block with the publication (name and language), the publication date and the article title. The name must match exactly how it appears on news.google.com, leaving out anything in parentheses. The language is an ISO 639 code, and the date uses a W3C format. The title is the article’s title as on the site, without author, publication name or date.
Google asks for articles from the last two days only. After that, remove the URLs or the news metadata. A news sitemap can hold at most 1,000 news:news tags, so larger volumes go into several files.
| Type | Purpose | Limits | Required elements |
|---|---|---|---|
| XML sitemap | a file with information about the pages, videos and other files on a site and the relationships between them | at most 50,000 URLs or 50 MB (uncompressed) per file; UTF-8, absolute URLs | urlset, and per URL a url with loc |
| Sitemap index | groups several sitemaps so they can be submitted together | at most 50,000 sitemaps and 50 MB per index; up to 500 index files per site in Search Console | sitemapindex, and per sitemap a sitemap with loc |
| Image sitemap | tells Google about images it might not otherwise find, such as images loaded with JavaScript | up to 1,000 image:image per url; otherwise as for XML sitemaps | image:image with image:loc |
| Video sitemap | adds information about videos hosted on the pages | as for XML sitemaps; description at most 2,048 characters | video:video with video:thumbnail_loc, video:title, video:description and either video:content_loc or video:player_loc |
| News sitemap (this term) | tells Google about news articles with extra details | up to 1,000 news:news per file; only articles from the last two days | news:news with news:publication (news:name, news:language), news:publication_date, news:title |
| Sitemap with hreflang | lists the language and regional versions of a page | as for XML sitemaps | per url a loc and one xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="…" for every version, including the page itself |
| HTML sitemap | a page of links for visitors to the site | – (not part of the sitemap protocol; Google says it cannot be submitted as a sitemap. Source: Google Search Central Blog, 2005) | – |
Image, video, news and hreflang data are extensions of the XML format; every file is limited to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB. Of the optional elements, Google uses lastmod if it is consistently and verifiably accurate and ignores priority and changefreq. The HTML sitemap details come from a 2005 Google blog post; Google's current sitemap documentation does not mention HTML sitemaps. Sources: Google Search Central: Build and submit a sitemap (last updated 2025-12-10); Google Search Central: Manage your sitemaps with sitemap index files; Google Search Central: Image sitemaps; Google Search Central: Video sitemaps; Google Search Central: Create a news sitemap; Google Search Central: Localized versions of your pages (sitemap method); sitemaps.org: Sitemaps XML format; Google Search Central Blog (2005): How is a Google Sitemap different from an HTML sitemap?. Last checked: .
Example
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/politics/budget-2027/</loc>
<news:news>
<news:publication>
<news:name>Example Daily</news:name>
<news:language>en</news:language>
</news:publication>
<news:publication_date>2026-10-06T08:30:00+02:00</news:publication_date>
<news:title>Budget 2027 presented</news:title>
</news:news>
</url>
Sources
- Google News sitemaps – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
Last updated: