What is the primary purpose of a sitemap?

The primary purpose of a sitemap is to aid search engine crawlers in understanding the structure of a website, enabling them to crawl the site more effectively. A sitemap functions as a blueprint that provides valuable information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, along with the relationships between them. This structured format allows search engines like Google to discover and index your content more efficiently, which can enhance visibility in search results.

By providing clear information about the hierarchy and relationships of the site's content, a sitemap can also ensure that new pages are indexed quickly and that important pages are prioritized in the crawling process. This is particularly beneficial for larger websites with numerous pages or for sites that frequently update content.

While planning the information architecture is a useful step during the website's development phase, and tracking performance is essential for ongoing optimization, neither relates directly to the primary function of a sitemap in the context of search engine optimization and crawling. Similarly, linking pages for domain authority is more about site structure and internal linking strategies rather than the specific role of a sitemap.