<changefreq>

The <changefreq> element advertises how often a page changes. Valid values: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never.

The honest version: it doesn't matter for Google

Google has stated multiple times (most recently John Mueller in 2017) that <changefreq> is ignored. Bing's documentation also de-emphasizes it. The reasons:

1. Sites lied with it constantly — every page marked <changefreq>daily</changefreq> regardless of reality.
2. Search engines develop their own per-URL crawl frequency models from actual change-detection (compare-and-hash), which beats any self-reported hint.
3. <lastmod> already conveys the only useful signal (when did it actually change).

If you have it set, you can leave it in your XML — it won't hurt. But there's no upside to investing time in computing it accurately.

When you'd still use it

• Niche crawlers that read the field literally. Some smaller search engines, academic archivers, and AI training crawlers still read <changefreq>. If your site cares about CCBot/Bytespider-style indexing, including it costs nothing.
• Internal documentation. Some teams emit <changefreq> purely to help their own analytics pipelines reason about page volatility.

Common mistakes

• Setting always on everything. This is the most common antipattern. Search engines treat it as a smell that the field is meaningless.
• Conflating <changefreq> with crawl budget. Crawl budget is determined by site authority, internal links, server response speed, and <lastmod> accuracy. <changefreq> does not influence it.
• Setting <changefreq>never</changefreq> to deindex. It doesn't. Use a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag or remove the URL from the sitemap instead.

What SitemapHost does

SitemapHost does not emit <changefreq> by default. The XML schema accepts it if you pass it explicitly in the API payload, but we don't infer or fabricate values.