What is a video sitemap?

Example

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/recipes/pour-over-coffee/</loc>
    <video:video>
      <video:thumbnail_loc>https://example.com/img/pour-over.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
      <video:title>How to brew pour-over coffee</video:title>
      <video:description>A four-minute walkthrough: grind size, bloom and pour.</video:description>
      <video:player_loc>https://www.youtube.com/embed/abc123XYZ</video:player_loc>
      <video:duration>245</video:duration>
      <video:publication_date>2026-10-02T08:00:00+00:00</video:publication_date>
    </video:video>
  </url>
</urlset>

Required and optional tags

<loc> is the page where people watch the video, not the video file. One page can list several <video:video> blocks. The usual sitemap limits apply: 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed per file.

Sitemap or VideoObject markup?

They are two routes to the same information. VideoObject structured data sits on the page and describes the video there. The sitemap describes it from outside. Google accepts either and recommends providing consistent details wherever you give them: a title in the sitemap that differs from the one in the markup is a conflict Google has to resolve.

Use markup when you can edit page templates. Add a sitemap when videos are embedded in ways crawlers may miss, or when you have a large library and want one place that lists it all.

What a sitemap cannot do

Google shows a video thumbnail beside a result mainly when the video is the main content of the page, a dedicated watch page. A blog post with a video halfway down may have its video indexed but is unlikely to get the large video treatment, and no sitemap entry changes that.

Other reasons a listed video is not indexed:

• the thumbnail or media URL is blocked by robots.txt or needs a login;
• the page loads the player only after a click, so Google never sees a video element;
• the thumbnail is too small or in an unsupported format;
• the video is hidden, tiny or outside the visible area when the page loads.

Search Console's Video indexing report lists pages where a video was found and whether it was indexed, with the reason when it was not.

Building one in WordPress

WordPress core's own sitemap has no video tags. Hydrogen SEO can generate a video sitemap at /video-sitemap.xml. It is off by default. Once switched on under Hydrogen SEO → Sitemap, it scans the post types you select for embedded videos, including YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia and self-hosted files, fetches each video's details from the provider in the background, and adds the file to your sitemap index, so there is nothing extra to submit. Details are in the video sitemap doc.

Whatever generates it, validate the file's basic structure with our XML sitemap validator and spot-check that thumbnail URLs open in a logged-out browser.