News sitemap

A news sitemap uses the news: namespace and is specifically for Google News. It tells Google about articles published within the last 2 days so they can appear in Google News, Top Stories, and Discover faster than via standard crawl discovery.

Hard rules

Only include articles published within the last 2 days. Articles older than 2 days should be removed from the news sitemap (they remain in your regular sitemap, which is what carries them long-term).
Maximum 1,000 URLs per news sitemap file. Smaller than the 50,000 URLs limit of standard sitemaps.
Must be approved for Google News. Your publication must be accepted into Google News before a news sitemap has any effect. Apply via the Publisher Center.

If you're not an approved Google News publisher, a news sitemap won't bring you into News — it'll be ignored. Focus on the regular sitemap.

Anatomy

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<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/news/2026/05/18/headline</loc>
    <news:news>
      <news:publication>
        <news:name>Example News</news:name>
        <news:language>en</news:language>
      </news:publication>
      <news:publication_date>2026-05-18T08:00:00Z</news:publication_date>
      <news:title>Headline of the article</news:title>
    </news:news>
  </url>
</urlset>

Required fields

Field	Required?	Notes
`news:publication > news:name`	Yes	Must exactly match your publication name in Google Publisher Center
`news:publication > news:language`	Yes	ISO 639 language code (`en`, `es`, etc.)
`news:publication_date`	Yes	Date the article was first published (W3C Datetime format)
`news:title`	Yes	Article headline

news:keywords, news:stock_tickers, and news:genres exist in older versions of the spec but are deprecated.

Update cadence

For an active news site, you should regenerate the news sitemap whenever a new article publishes. Pinging via the Indexing API or IndexNow shortens the gap further. Some publishers regenerate every 5–10 minutes; that's fine.

Common mistakes

Including articles older than 2 days. They get ignored and clutter the file. Build a rolling window into your generation logic.
Mismatched publication name. "Example News" in sitemap vs. "ExampleNews" in Publisher Center will silently fail.
Wrong date format. Must include timezone (Z or +HH:MM). Date-only is permitted but timestamped is recommended for news.
Including non-article URLs. Section pages, tag pages, author pages don't belong in a news sitemap.

What SitemapHost does

Named sitemaps in SitemapHost include a news content type. When generating a sitemap with sitemapName: "news", we emit the news: namespace and validate the 2-day rolling-window constraint, dropping articles older than the cutoff.

`news:news`