A news sitemap is a specialized XML sitemap that lists a site's recent news articles to help Google discover and surface them quickly in Google News and the news results.
It follows the standard sitemap format but adds a Google News namespace with extra tags for each article, most importantly the publication name and the publication date. Because news has a short shelf life, the news sitemap is built for freshness: it should contain only articles published in the last two days, and older entries should be removed as they age out. This narrow, fast-updating scope is what separates it from a regular sitemap.
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/article</loc>
<news:news>
<news:publication>
<news:name>Example News</news:name>
<news:language>en</news:language>
</news:publication>
<news:publication_date>2026-06-13</news:publication_date>
<news:title>Headline of the article</news:title>
</news:news>
</url>A news sitemap speeds up discovery for time-sensitive content, which matters in a vertical where being indexed minutes faster can decide visibility. It does not by itself grant inclusion in Google News; a site still needs to meet Google's news content policies. Submit the news sitemap in Search Console and keep it current, removing stale URLs so Google is not pointed at articles that have already aged out.
Related: Indexing, Indexation check
Claude Vincent is a technical SEO consultant focused on crawlability, rendering, and AI-search visibility. He writes the field guides and case studies at SEO ProCheck, with a bias toward the durable, unglamorous work that decides whether search engines and AI answer engines can actually read and cite a site.
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