Sitemap support
Sitemaps allow you to inform search engines about URLs that are available for crawling. This makes your content more discoverable, and improves your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
How it works
The sitemap.xml file is read by search engines to index your documentation.
It contains information such as:
When a URL was last updated.
How often that URL changes.
How important this URL is in relation to other URLs on the site.
What translations are available for a page.
Read the Docs automatically generates a sitemap.xml for your project.
The sitemap includes public and not hidden versions of your documentation and when they were last updated,
sorted by version number.
This allows search engines to prioritize results based on the version number, sorted by semantic versioning.
Custom sitemap.xml
You can provide a custom sitemap.xml file with your docs build output.
Read the Docs looks for this file in the default version of your project,
because sitemap.xml is served from the root of your docs domain.
If this custom file exists, it is served as-is. If it does not exist, Read the Docs serves the generated sitemap instead.
You can also point crawlers to a different sitemap URL via robots.txt.
See robots.txt support for details.
For example, in robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://docs.example.com/en/stable/sitemap.xml