A site map is a list of pages of a website within a domain. There are three primary kinds of site maps: Site maps used during the planning of a Web site by its designers. Human-visible listings, typically hierarchical, of the pages on a site. Structured listings intended for web crawlers such as search engines.

A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. ... You can use a sitemap to provide information about specific types of content on your pages, including video and image content.

Sitemaps may be addressed to users or to software. Many sites have user-visible sitemaps which present a systematic view, typically hierarchical, of the site. These are intended to help visitors find specific pages, and can also be used by crawlers. Alphabetically organized site maps, sometimes called site indexes, are a different approach.

For use by search engines and other crawlers, there is a structured format, the XML sitemap, which lists the pages in a site, their relative importance, and how often they are updated. This is pointed to from the robots.txt file and is typically called sitemap.xml. The structured format is particularly important for websites that include pages that are not accessible through links from other pages, but only through the site's search tools or by dynamic construction of URLs in JavaScript or Adobe Flash.