Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file (or, increasingly, a programmatic equivalent) listing every URL on the site that the owner wants indexed. Each entry can include a `lastmod` timestamp, change frequency, and priority hint. The file lives at a known path — usually `/sitemap.xml` — and is referenced from `robots.txt`.

Search engines crawl sitemaps to discover URLs they might not find via internal links alone. For a small studio site, the discovery benefit is modest because crawlers will reach everything via the homepage anyway. The real value is the `lastmod` field — search engines use it to schedule recrawls, so an updated `lastmod` on a freshly edited article speeds up indexation noticeably.

Frameworks like Next.js generate sitemaps from a single function (`app/sitemap.ts`) at build time, so there’s no excuse to ship without one.