Sitemaps don't drive crawl. Internal links do. People have this backwards.

Sitemaps don't drive crawl. Internal links do. People have this backwards.

Myth: a page is in the sitemap, so Google will crawl it.

No. Google has said repeatedly that a sitemap is a hint of existence, not a command to crawl, and a URL listed only in the sitemap with no internal links is a weak signal it often skips.

Here's the thing. Internal linking is the actual crawl-budget allocator. A page three clicks deep with one inbound link gets crawled rarely. The same page in your main nav gets crawled constantly. Googlebot follows links far more eagerly than it works a sitemap.

The tradeoff: sitemaps are great for discovery of orphaned-but-wanted pages and for lastmod scheduling. They're useless for importance.

Want a page crawled more? Link to it more. The XML file is a backup, not the engine.