What is a news sitemap?
A news sitemap is a special XML sitemap for news publishers. It lists only articles published in the last two days, and adds a <news:news> block to each URL with the publication name, language, publication date and headline. Its purpose is speed: it points Google at fresh stories within minutes of publication.
It does not make a site eligible for Google News. It helps a news site that already qualifies get crawled sooner.
Format
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/city/council-approves-budget/</loc>
<news:news>
<news:publication>
<news:name>The Example Times</news:name>
<news:language>en</news:language>
</news:publication>
<news:publication_date>2026-11-12T07:30:00+00:00</news:publication_date>
<news:title>Council approves 2027 budget</news:title>
</news:news>
</url>
</urlset>
All four values are required. news:name must match the publication's name as it appears on Google News, and news:language is an ISO 639 code.
The rules that differ from a normal sitemap
- Two-day window. Include only articles from the last two days. Older entries should drop out. They stay in Google's index: the sitemap is a discovery feed, not the list of what is indexed.
- 1,000 URLs per file. Beyond that, split into several files under a sitemap index.
- Update in place. Add new articles to the existing sitemap as they are published. Google advises against creating a new sitemap file for each update.
- Original publication date.
news:publication_dateis when the article first went live, not when it was last edited.
Who needs one
Publishers of timely reporting: newspapers, broadcasters, trade news sites, local news. For those, minutes matter, and a dedicated feed of the newest URLs is checked more often than a full sitemap of tens of thousands.
A company blog, a shop or an evergreen content site does not need one. Their regular sitemap already lists every post, and a news sitemap filled with non-news content brings no benefit.
Google considers publishers for news surfaces automatically, based on its content policies. There is no application through which a news sitemap gets you in.
Related signals to get right
The sitemap gets the article crawled. What Google shows comes from the page: a clear headline, a visible date and byline, and Article or NewsArticle structured data with datePublished and dateModified. A large lead image and the max-image-preview:large setting matter for Google Discover and Top stories.
Creating one in WordPress
WordPress core's sitemap has no news variant. Hydrogen SEO publishes one at /news-sitemap.xml. It is off by default; switch it on under Hydrogen SEO → Sitemap, set the publication name, which falls back to the site title if left empty, and review the remaining options. The news sitemap doc walks through the options.
Submit the address once in Search Console under Sitemaps, then check after a publishing day that the report shows it as read successfully and that entries older than two days have left the file.
Common questions
Do I need a news sitemap to appear in Google News?
No. It is not a requirement and does not grant inclusion. It helps Google discover new articles faster on sites that publish news.
How many URLs can a news sitemap contain?
Up to 1,000 per sitemap file. Larger publishers split entries across several news sitemaps listed in a sitemap index.
Should old articles stay in the news sitemap?
No. Remove articles once they are more than two days old. They remain indexed and should be listed in your regular XML sitemap.