video:video

A video sitemap uses the video: namespace to declare video content embedded on each page. It helps Google Video and Google Search index your videos for video-result carousels and rich snippets.

When you need one

• Self-hosted videos (not YouTube/Vimeo). Google can discover YouTube videos via YouTube's own infrastructure; for self-hosted players, an explicit video sitemap is the most reliable signal.
• JavaScript-rendered video players. If your player initialises after page load, Google's video crawler may miss the underlying file.
• Paywalled or gated videos. Combine with the Access schema to indicate availability.
• Sites with hundreds of unique videos. Course platforms, tutorial sites, documentary archives.

For sites with the occasional embedded YouTube video and not much else, a video sitemap is overkill.

Required fields

If the video is on YouTube and you want to declare it from your own sitemap, use <video:player_loc> pointing at the YouTube embed URL.

Useful optional fields

• video:duration (seconds, 1–28,800)
• video:expiration_date (when the video should be removed from index)
• video:rating (0.0–5.0)
• video:view_count
• video:publication_date
• video:family_friendly (yes/no)
• video:tag (1–32 per video)

Anatomy

<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/courses/intro-react</loc>
    <video:video>
      <video:thumbnail_loc>https://example.com/thumbs/intro-react.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
      <video:title>Intro to React — chapter 1</video:title>
      <video:description>Setup and first component.</video:description>
      <video:content_loc>https://cdn.example.com/videos/intro-react-1.mp4</video:content_loc>
      <video:duration>720</video:duration>
      <video:publication_date>2026-05-18T08:00:00Z</video:publication_date>
    </video:video>
  </url>
</urlset>

Limits

• 1,000 videos per <url> entry.
• Thumbnail must be at least 160 × 90 pixels and a standard format (JPG, PNG, GIF).
• <video:content_loc> must point at a directly-playable file, not a landing page.

Common mistakes

• Putting a webpage URL in video:content_loc. It must be a media file (.mp4, .webm, etc.). Use video:player_loc for HTML players.
• Allowing Googlebot-Video to be blocked in robots.txt. Check your robots.txt explicitly.
• No thumbnail. Required. Without it, the entry is invalid.
• Mismatched canonical and video URL. The page hosting the video should canonicalise to itself, not to a different page.

What SitemapHost does

The SitemapHost API accepts a video object per URL with all the standard video: fields. We validate required fields at submission time, ensuring Google's video sitemap rules are met before XML generation.