What does this statement from Google actually say?

Martin Splitt highlights a technical fact that many SEO practitioners take for granted, namely that most modern CMS (WordPress, Shopify, Wix, etc.) and static hosting platforms (Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages) generate sitemap.xml files without users writing a single line of code, significantly lowering the barrier to making a site technically discoverable by Googlebot.

The message targets two audiences. It also has a broader intent: to reassure beginners, who probably don’t need to create a sitemap manually, and to remind that Google favors solutions that facilitate the adoption of best practices by default. Splitt positions CMS as facilitators of technical SEO compliance.

Why is Google emphasizing this point now?

Because the myth of the mandatory manual sitemap still circulates in many outdated forums and tutorials. Beginners are coding their sitemaps by hand while their tech stack is already taking care of it. That's wasted time.

There’s likely another reason: reduce technical support by steering users towards platforms that natively manage indexing signals. Fewer basic questions in Search Console, fewer malformed sitemaps that slow down crawling.

What limitations does this automation have?

An automatically generated sitemap often includes all indexable URLs by default, without sorting strategic pages from those that do not matter. Take an e-commerce site with 50,000 products: the file could potentially include permanently out-of-stock listings, duplicated filter pages, and empty categories.

There’s also the question of crawl budget, which automation ignores. A manually crafted sitemap eliminates non-strategic URLs, assigns relative priorities, and segments URLs by type (products, articles, categories) to facilitate analysis in Search Console. CMS do none of this by default.

• Modern CMS generate XML sitemaps automatically, reducing manual interventions
• This automation aims to democratize technical SEO best practices
• An auto-generated sitemap often includes non-strategic or redundant URLs
• Prioritizing crawl budget generally requires manual intervention
• Google encourages the adoption of platforms that natively facilitate discoverability

Is this statement consistent with field observations?

Yes, in principle. WordPress with Yoast or Rank Math produces a clean sitemap in two clicks, Shopify does it natively, and Wix, Squarespace, or Webflow are no exceptions. For 80% of sites with fewer than 1000 pages, this is sufficient. Tests confirm it: Googlebot discovers and explores these sitemaps without encountering serious technical barriers.

However, there’s a subtlety that Splitt overlooks: automatic does not mean optimal. Consider a news site with 200,000 articles. The auto-generated sitemap by WordPress often includes dated archives, author pages lacking unique content, pagination URLs, and crawl budget is wasted on pages with low SEO ROI. [To be verified] in actual crawls: how many sites with auto sitemaps show an effective discovery rate above 70% in Search Console?

In what cases does automation cause problems?

High-volume sites suffer from this: e-commerce with thousands of SKUs, media with deep archives, marketplaces. Generated sitemaps quickly hit the 50,000 URL limit per file, necessitating the creation of index sitemaps. The logic of segmentation often remains rudimentary. Chronological or alphabetical most often, almost never by SEO performance or strategic priority.

The second critical case: dynamic filter facet sites. A standard CMS cannot distinguish a relevant filter URL from a redundant combination, leading to thousands of filter URLs in the sitemap, diluting signals sent to main categories. I have seen sites lose 30% of their organic traffic after a redesign on Shopify. The cause? An auto sitemap that included 15,000 filter URLs never crawled before.

Should we disable automatic sitemaps?

No. They need to be audited and configured. In WordPress, the settings of your SEO plugin allow you to disable irrelevant content types, with author pages and temporal archives at the top. In Shopify, an app like SEO Manager can exclude empty collections or product variants.

When the CMS does not allow any fine customization of the automatic sitemap, a hybrid solution is required: keep the default sitemap for regular pages and manually build a complementary sitemap covering strategic sections. Another option: a custom script that queries your database based on business criteria and regenerates an optimized sitemap with each publication.

What should you check on your automatic sitemap?

Download your sitemap.xml file and check its actual composition: how many URLs, what types of pages? A Screaming Frog crawl serves as a point of comparison. It reveals URLs that are present in the sitemap but do not appear in internal navigation, and vice versa.

Go to Search Console for the discovery rate. Over the last 30 days, how many URLs from the sitemap have actually been crawled and then indexed? Below 60%, the problem originates either from the quality of included URLs or from crawl budget. Google also reports errors that need to be reviewed: unreachable URLs, redirects, pages blocked by robots.txt.

How to optimize an automatically generated sitemap?

In WordPress, filters from your SEO plugin allow you to exclude non-strategic taxonomies (tags with fewer than 3 articles, empty categories, temporal archives). Shopify follows the same logic: disable the automatic inclusion of collection pages once you exceed 500 poorly differentiated categories. Build your exclusion rules based on business criteria, zero stock, old publication date, low historical traffic.

Beyond 10,000 pages, consider segmenting your sitemap: one for active product pages, one for recent articles, one for institutional pages. Monitoring in Search Console benefits, and crawling high-ROI sections becomes a priority. Last point, often overlooked: the lastmod tag should only change if the content truly changes, not with every rebuild.

When should you switch to a customized solution?

Once 20,000 indexable URLs or more than 100 new pages per week are reached, standard automation hits its limits. A persistent gap between the number of URLs declared in your sitemap and the number of effectively indexed pages is a clear indicator.

Another indicator: a manifestly insufficient crawl budget, with strategic pages being crawled less than once a month in Search Console. It becomes necessary to reduce the size of the sitemap by excluding low-value pages. When the challenge becomes finely prioritizing crawl resources and optimizing information architecture, a specialized SEO agency can audit the existing structure and build a customized sitemap strategy.

• Download and analyze the exact composition of the current sitemap.xml
• Compare the sitemap content with a full site crawl
• Check the discovery and indexing rates in Search Console
• Exclude non-strategic content types via CMS settings
• Segment the sitemap by content type if the site exceeds 10,000 pages
• Update the lastmod tag only when there are real content changes