Short answer: only <loc> is required, and besides that only <lastmod> still matters, when its dates are true. Google ignores <priority> and <changefreq>; it said so again in 2023. They do no harm, but they don't help either.
The tags
- <loc> (required)
- The full address of the page, including https:// and your domain. Use the exact address you want in search results: the same http or https, with or without www, as the rest of your site.
- <lastmod>
- The date the page's content last changed, like 2026-10-31 or 2026-10-31T14:30:00+00:00. Google and Bing use it to decide what to crawl again, but only when the dates have proven reliable. A sitemap that gives every page today's date teaches them to ignore the tag.
- <changefreq>
- How often the page changes: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never. Google ignores it.
- <priority>
- How important the page is compared to your other pages, from 0.0 to 1.0. Google ignores it, and it never made a page rank higher.
What to put in your sitemap
- Always <loc>, for every page you want found and nothing else: no redirects, no error pages, no pages blocked by robots.txt or marked noindex.
- <lastmod> only if you know when each page really changed. Your content management system usually does; a crawler usually doesn't.
- <priority> and <changefreq> only if another search engine you care about asks for them.
In our generator
Our spider can add all three optional tags, and you can switch each one on or off per site with the Edit button in your control panel. Priority and change frequency are estimated from your links. The spider cannot see when you edited a page, so the lastmod it writes is the date it fetched the page. If you update your site often and want search engines to trust your dates, you may be better off with lastmod switched off.