Shopify Sitemap: Submit It and Get Indexed

Your Shopify sitemap is at yourstore.com/sitemap.xml, and it is generated for you. You do not create it, you cannot edit it, and it updates on its own when you add or remove a product.

Which means the question "how do I make a sitemap for Shopify" has a one-line answer, and almost nobody arriving at it actually needed that line. The real question, the one that brought you here, is further down: the sitemap exists, the page is inside it, and Google still is not showing the page. That is a different problem with a different fix, and it starts with a distinction Search Console makes and most guides skip.

Where is my Shopify sitemap?

At the root of your domain, always:

https://yourstore.com/sitemap.xml

Open it and you will find an index rather than a list of pages. Shopify splits the sitemap into one file per content type, which is why the first thing you see is a handful of links:

Shopify's documentation describes the contents as "links to all your products, primary product image, pages, collections, and blog posts", and the path to find yours is documented here. The numbered suffix increments as a catalogue outgrows one file, so a large store has sitemap_products_1.xml, _2, and so on.

If yours returns a 404, you are almost certainly looking at the wrong domain. The sitemap lives on your primary domain. mystore.myshopify.com redirects to it, and international domains get their own.

How do I submit my sitemap to Google?

Once, in about three minutes.

1. Open Google Search Console and add your property using the primary domain, the one customers see, not the .myshopify.com address.
2. Verify ownership. The DNS record method is the most durable, and Shopify-managed domains let you add a TXT record in the domain settings.
3. Open Sitemaps in the left menu.
4. Enter sitemap.xml and submit.

Shopify's own walkthrough of the same steps is here.

Two things to expect afterwards. The status will read "Success" within a day or so, and it means Google read the file, nothing more. And you never do this again: the sitemap URL stays the same forever, and Shopify keeps the contents current.

Submitting does not make Google index anything. It tells Google the addresses exist. What happens next is the part worth understanding.

Crawled versus indexed, which is where everyone gets stuck

Open the Pages report in Search Console, under Indexing. Every URL Google knows about sits in one of two groups, and the two statuses that generate the most confusion are these:

Discovered, currently not indexed. Google knows the URL exists, from your sitemap, and has not fetched it yet. It has looked at your site, formed a view about how much of it is worth crawling, and put this page in the queue behind that judgement. On a new store this is normal for a few weeks. On an old store with thousands of products it usually means the catalogue is larger than the interest the site has earned.

Crawled, currently not indexed. This is the important one. Google fetched the page, read it, and decided not to add it to the index. Nothing is broken. There is no error to fix, no tag to change, no setting in Shopify that will alter it. Google looked at the content and concluded that it did not add anything to what is already in the results.

The reference for what every status means is Google's page indexing report documentation.

The reason this distinction matters is that it splits the entire problem in half:

• Not crawled is a discovery and priority problem. Internal links, sitemap presence, site speed and overall site quality move it.
• Crawled but not indexed is a content problem. Only the page changes it.

Resubmitting your sitemap fixes neither, which does not stop it from being the most common advice on this query.

What you cannot change about a Shopify sitemap

Worth knowing, because a fair amount of SEO advice assumes controls that Shopify does not expose.

• You cannot edit the file. No manual entries, no removals, no reordering.
• You cannot set priority or change frequency. Google ignores both anyway, and has said so.
• You cannot exclude a single page from within the sitemap. Exclusion happens elsewhere, see below.
• You cannot add a page that is not a Shopify object. If it is not a product, collection, page or blog post published to the Online Store, it is not in there.

What you can edit is robots.txt, through robots.txt.liquid in the theme code. It is a real control, and it is one to treat carefully: blocking a URL in robots.txt stops Google crawling it, which is not the same as removing it from the index, and it can leave a page listed with no description at all.

Which pages does Shopify leave out?

Deliberately, and correctly:

• Products and collections not published to the Online Store sales channel.
• Draft and archived products.
• Pages that are not visible.
• Cart, checkout, account and search results pages.
• Filtered and sorted collection URLs, which is a good thing, since those multiply without limit.

So the first check when a product is missing from the sitemap is not the sitemap. It is the product's sales channel. A product published only to Point of Sale or to a marketplace is invisible to your storefront, and this is one of the most common causes behind a store that appears to be missing from Google entirely, which is diagnosed in full in why a Shopify store is not showing on Google.

The page is in the sitemap and still not indexed. Now what?

Assuming the sales channel is right and the page is not blocked, work down this list.

1. Check the exact status in Search Console with the URL Inspection tool. Discovered and Crawled are different diagnoses, per the section above.
2. Read the page as a stranger. If the description is the manufacturer's paragraph, the same text is on every other store selling that product, and Google has already indexed one of those pages. This is the single most common cause of "crawled, currently not indexed" on a product catalogue, and it is worked through in Shopify duplicate content.
3. Give the page internal links. A product that no collection contains and no menu reaches is a page Google has little reason to prioritise. Finding those products is covered in collection page SEO.
4. Fix the thin ones first. Two sentences and a price is a page with nothing to rank with. How long a product description should be has the length that fits each product type.
5. Request indexing, once. URL Inspection, Request Indexing. It is a queue, not a switch, and doing it repeatedly achieves nothing.
6. Then wait. Google's own starter guide is blunt about the timescale: "Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months".

FAQ

Where is my Shopify sitemap? At yourstore.com/sitemap.xml, on your primary domain. It is generated automatically and updates itself when your catalogue changes.

Do I need to submit my sitemap to Google? It is not strictly required, since Google can find it, but it is three minutes of work and it gives you the Pages report in Search Console, which is where you diagnose everything else.

Can I edit my Shopify sitemap? No. Shopify generates it and does not expose the file. To keep something out, unpublish it from the Online Store sales channel.

Why are my products not in my Shopify sitemap? Almost always because they are not published to the Online Store sales channel, or they are draft or archived. Check the product's sales channel first.

What does crawled, currently not indexed mean? Google fetched the page and chose not to index it. There is no error to fix. It is a judgement about the content, and only changing the page changes the outcome.

How long does Shopify take to get indexed by Google? Usually a few days to a few weeks for a new store, and longer for individual pages deep in a large catalogue. Google states that some changes take hours and others take months.

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The frustrating shape of this problem is that the sitemap is the one part of it you are allowed to control, and it is also the part that is already working. Everything past "Success" in Search Console comes down to whether each page is worth a slot in the index.

Yikfy works on the half of that you can actually move. For each product it reads the title, type, vendor, tags and existing description and writes a description, a meta title and a meta description of its own, at the lengths Google displays, so the page has something on it that no other store selling the same catalogue has. It also proposes up to four of your existing collections per product, which is how the orphaned products get the internal links they have been missing.

You review everything in a queue and publish what you approve. Nothing is pushed to your store before that.