Part of the SiteMap Series
In the last lesson, we walked through what each XML sitemap element is designed to do. The protocol assigns specific jobs to loc, lastmod, changefreq, and priority. Two of them, changefreq and priority, are meant to give search engines hints about how often pages change and how important they are relative to other pages on your site.
I closed that lesson with a cliffhanger about whether Google actually pays attention to those hints. This lesson is the answer, and it might be slightly more interesting than you expected.
The short version is this. Google ignores both priority and changefreq. Not “downplays them” or “uses them as one signal among many”, but ignores them entirely. This isn’t speculation or industry gossip. Google has stated it directly in their own developer documentation, and senior members of their Search Relations team have confirmed it publicly for over a decade. The longer version explains why, what Google does pay attention to, and what this means for how you should approach generating sitemaps going forward.
What Google has actually said
The cleanest source is Google’s own developer documentation on building sitemaps. The current version reads, almost verbatim: Google ignores priority and changefreq values. Google uses the lastmod value if it’s consistently and verifiably accurate. That’s not buried in a footnote somewhere. It’s in the main documentation page for building sitemaps that any developer would land on when looking up how to build one.
The position has been consistent for years. In 2015, John Mueller from Google’s Search Relations team said in a video hangout that priority and change frequency “don’t really play that much of a role with Sitemaps anymore” and that timestamps are more useful than either. In March 2017, Gary Illyes from the same team called the priority element “a bag of noise” in a public tweet. Since then, every public statement from Google about sitemap metadata has reinforced the same position.
The reasoning behind the position is straightforward. Priority and changefreq are self-reported by site owners. Site owners, on the whole, are unreliable reporters about which of their own pages are most important and how often they change. Most sitemap generators set every page to priority 1.0 by default, which is the same as setting them all to 0.5 because the values are relative. Most changefreq values overstate how often pages actually change, because site owners want their pages crawled more often. Across the web at large, the signal-to-noise ratio in these fields is so low that Google decided long ago to ignore them entirely and use other signals instead.
What Google does pay attention to
If Google ignores two of the four elements, what does it actually use?
- The first is the URL itself. The loc element tells Google a URL exists. That’s the foundational job of a sitemap and the only required element. Without loc, the entry doesn’t exist.
- The second is the lastmod element, conditionally. Google uses lastmod when it’s consistently and verifiably accurate. The word “consistently” is doing important work in that sentence. If your sitemap generator updates lastmod to the current date on every regeneration, regardless of whether the underlying content changed, Google detects the pattern and loses trust in your dates. Once that trust is gone, Google reverts to ignoring lastmod and falls back on its own observation of when pages actually change. This is the warning that sits underneath the lastmod element. It works if you respect it. It stops working if you abuse it. We covered the formatting rules in Lesson 8: What Each XML Sitemap Element Does, and the underlying principle is the same one that applies to priority and changefreq: self-reported metadata works only as long as the self-reporting stays honest.
- The third source of information Google uses isn’t from your sitemap at all. It’s from Google’s own observation of your site. Page authority and link signals, the freshness of content as Google has seen it on previous crawls, how often pages have actually changed historically, and the structure of internal linking on the site. Those signals are far more reliable than anything you can claim in your sitemap, because they’re based on what’s actually happening rather than on what you’ve asserted.
So the practical picture is: loc tells Google a URL exists. Accurate lastmod helps Google decide which URLs to recrawl first. Everything else in the sitemap is, for Google’s purposes, noise.
Other engines, AI crawlers, and the nuance
The picture isn’t quite as simple as “Google ignores them so you should too”, because Google isn’t the only search engine that crawls your site.
Bing has historically been more open to using changefreq as one signal among several for crawl scheduling, though Bing has been less explicit about exactly how it uses the value. Yandex, which still has meaningful search market share in some regions, actively reads sitemap hints for crawl prioritisation. DuckDuckGo and other privacy-focused engines tend to follow Google’s behaviour because they rely on similar infrastructure, but their exact handling isn’t documented as clearly. The newer AI search crawlers that have emerged since 2023 are a moving target, with some respecting the sitemap signals more closely than Google does as they build out their crawling logic, and others adopting Google’s stance of treating priority and changefreq as noise.
The summary is that priority and changefreq aren’t doing nothing on the open web. They’re doing nothing for Google specifically. For everyone else, the picture is mixed, ranging from “actively uses them” (Yandex, smaller engines) to “treats them as one minor signal” (Bing) to “ignores them” (Google and the engines that follow Google’s lead).
This matters because it changes the practical recommendation. If your site only cares about Google traffic, you can safely ignore priority and changefreq when generating sitemaps and lose nothing. If your site has meaningful traffic from Bing, Yandex, or AI crawlers, leaving them in (with sensible values your CMS generates automatically) is the safer choice.
Should you still include them?
Given everything above, the question of whether to include priority and changefreq in your sitemap has a layered answer.
If your CMS or SEO plugin generates them automatically, leave them alone. Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, Shopify, Wix, and every other major platform handle this. The values they generate are usually sensible defaults that won’t hurt anything. The minor effort of removing them entirely isn’t worth your time, and they may help with non-Google crawlers.
If you’re hand-rolling a sitemap or doing custom generation, the calculus is different. Including the elements means deciding what values to set, maintaining those values as your site grows, and keeping them in sync with reality. For Google specifically, you’d gain nothing from the effort. For other crawlers, you might gain something, but probably not much. In hand-rolled sitemaps, leaving priority and changefreq out entirely is a reasonable choice that saves you ongoing maintenance work.
The mistake to avoid in either case is spending time manually tuning these values for SEO purposes. Setting all your important pages to priority 1.0 in the hope that Google will treat them as more important is a waste of effort. Carefully calibrating changefreq values to match your editorial schedule is a waste of effort. That energy is better spent on things Google actually cares about: content quality, internal linking, page experience signals, and keeping your lastmod values honest.
The accurate-lastmod rule deserves its own moment
One thing this lesson should leave you with above everything else is the importance of getting lastmod right.
Lastmod is the one optional element Google actually uses. Done well, it helps Google decide which pages to recrawl after content updates, which can shorten the time between you publishing changes and Google noticing them. Done poorly, it teaches Google to ignore your dates and rely on its own observation, which is slower and less responsive to what you’ve actually changed.
Doing lastmod well means three things. First, only update it when the content actually changed in a significant way (the main content, structured data, or links on the page), not when the copyright year ticked over or your sitemap got regenerated. Second, use the ISO 8601 date format consistently (YYYY-MM-DD is fine for most sites, full datetime is rare unless you need precision down to the hour). Third, never set lastmod to a future date or to the date of a regeneration that didn’t change anything.
If your CMS handles lastmod correctly out of the box, you don’t need to think about this. If you’re managing sitemap generation manually, this is the one element in the protocol that genuinely repays careful attention.
Where this leaves us
Google ignores priority and changefreq. They’ve said so directly in their documentation, and they’ve reinforced the position publicly for over a decade. The elements aren’t doing harm by being in your sitemap, but they aren’t doing the work most articles claim they do either. The energy that goes into manually tuning them is better spent elsewhere.
What Google does pay attention to is loc (which is required anyway) and lastmod (when you keep it honest). The accuracy of those two elements is what determines how useful your sitemap is to Google specifically. Everything else in the sitemap is either for non-Google crawlers or it’s noise.
That’s the answer to the question this lesson opened with. The reason it took a full lesson to give it is that the simple version (“Google ignores them”) leaves out the nuances that change what you should actually do: the other engines that still use them, the lastmod warning about honest updates, and the practical recommendation about hand-rolled versus auto-generated sitemaps. With all of that in your head, you now know more about how sitemaps actually work in practice than most working SEOs.
We have one lesson left in Module One. In the next and final lesson of this module, we’ll step back and look at what sitemaps can and can’t do, the limits of what they accomplish, and the common misconceptions that quietly hold site owners back. It’s the closer that puts everything we’ve covered in context.
Up next: The Limits of a Sitemap: What It Can and Can’t Do →
This is Module 1: Lesson 9 of The Sitemap Series, a Technical SEO series on sitemaps from first principles, built for the AI Search era.