Use a blog sitemap as an inventory of public article URLs you want discovered. It complements navigation; it does not replace links from the blog index and relevant articles.
What to inspect
- Include canonical article destinations that return useful pages.
- Exclude missing drafts, private previews, and duplicate parameter variations.
- Update modification dates when the underlying content materially changes.
- Keep the index usable for someone browsing without a search box.
A sitemap containing 75 articles is not evidence that 75 articles were indexed. Discovery, crawling, indexing, and appearing for a query are separate observations. Track them separately when reviewing the library.
A check you can run
Compare the article source list with the generated sitemap. Fetch every listed article and flag missing URLs, repeated canonicals, and entries that lead to login screens.
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