Sitemap

Dune automatically generates an XML sitemap at /sitemap.xml. No configuration is required.

What's included

The sitemap includes a page if ALL of the following are true:

published: true in frontmatter
The page has a routable URL (not a module/index-only page)
All ancestor pages in the content tree are also published

Pages excluded from routing (module pages, pages with published: false, or pages whose parents are unpublished) are silently omitted.

URL format

https://example.com/sitemap.xml

The base URL comes from site.url in config/site.yaml. Set this to your production domain to generate correct absolute URLs.

Priority

Each URL's <priority> is calculated from its depth in the content tree:

priority = max(0.1, 1.0 − depth × 0.2)

Depth	Example	Priority
0 (home)	`/`	1.0
1	`/blog`	0.8
2	`/blog/hello-world`	0.6
3	`/blog/2025/hello`	0.4
4+	deeper pages	0.1 (floor)

Change frequency

Each URL includes a <changefreq> hint derived from its depth:

Depth	`<changefreq>`
0 (home)	`daily`
1	`weekly`
2+	`monthly`

This is a hint to crawlers and is not guaranteed to reflect actual update frequency.

Override the default for specific routes via config/site.yaml. The longest matching prefix wins:

sitemap:
  changefreq:
    "/": "hourly"        # home page
    "/blog": "daily"     # /blog and all children unless more specific key matches

Valid values: always · hourly · daily · weekly · monthly · yearly · never

Last modified date

Each URL's <lastmod> is the file modification time of the content file, formatted as YYYY-MM-DD.

Multilingual sites

For sites with more than one language configured (see Multilingual Content), the sitemap adds xhtml:link alternates to each URL entry:

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/about</loc>
  <lastmod>2025-06-15</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/about"/>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/about"/>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/about"/>
</url>

Every language variant of a page is grouped by its source content path (with the language suffix stripped). Each variant gets the full set of hreflang alternates, and an x-default entry always points to the default-language URL.

Excluding routes

To omit routes from the sitemap, add a sitemap.exclude list to config/site.yaml. Both exact matches and prefix matches are supported:

sitemap:
  exclude:
    - "/private"    # excludes /private and /private/anything
    - "/members"

Pages whose routes start with any listed prefix are silently omitted.

Cover images

If a page has an image frontmatter field set to a co-located image filename, the sitemap includes an <image:image> entry for that page:

---
title: "My Post"
date: 2026-03-09
image: cover.jpg
---

This produces:

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/blog/my-post</loc>
  ...
  <image:image>
    <image:loc>https://example.com/content-media/02.blog/01.my-post/cover.jpg</image:loc>
  </image:image>
</url>

The xmlns:image namespace attribute is added to <urlset> automatically when any image entries are present. See Frontmatter Reference for the image field.

Generation timing

Mode	When generated
`dune serve`	Once at startup, then cached
`dune dev`	Regenerated on each request

In production (dune serve), the sitemap is built once when the server starts. Restart the server after adding or removing pages to update it.