Last updated: 9 Feb 2026
GOV.UK's sitemap
GOV.UK’s sitemap is available at https://www.gov.uk/sitemap.xml.
GOV.UK is far too big to fit into one sitemap, so this file is more of a ‘sitemap index’, which references around 30 other XML files, such as https://www.gov.uk/sitemaps/sitemap_1.xml.
How the sitemap is generated
Every morning, a search-api-generate-sitemap cronjob runs to generate a fresh sitemap.
The cronjob runs the sitemap:generate_and_upload rake task in search-api. This enumerates over all documents in Search API and generates a sitemap matching the format specified in https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html. This job also creates the sitemap index.
The sitemap generator is configured to search for documents across all of Search API’s indexes.