Sitemap Priority and Changefreq: Do They Matter?

Every XML sitemap tutorial mentions the <priority> and <changefreq> tags. Most CMS platforms include them by default. SEO plugins let you configure them per page. And yet, the largest search engine in the world ignores both of them completely.

Here's what these tags actually are, why Google doesn't care about them, whether other search engines do, and what you should focus on instead.

What Are Priority and Changefreq?

The Sitemap Protocol defines four optional elements for each URL entry. Two of them -- <priority> and <changefreq> -- are meant to give search engines hints about your content.

Priority

The <priority> tag is a value between 0.0 and 1.0 that indicates the relative importance of a URL compared to other URLs on your site. The default value is 0.5.

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
  <priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/about</loc>
  <priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/old-blog-post</loc>
  <priority>0.3</priority>
</url>

The idea is simple: your homepage is more important than a random blog post, so you assign it a higher priority. The search engine uses this to decide what to crawl first.

In theory.

Changefreq

The <changefreq> tag tells search engines how often a page is likely to change. Valid values are:

• always -- Changes every time it's accessed (e.g., stock ticker)
• hourly
• daily
• weekly
• monthly
• yearly
• never -- Archived content that won't change

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/news</loc>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/about</loc>
  <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
</url>

The intent is to help search engines allocate their crawl budget efficiently. If a page changes daily, crawl it more often. If it changes yearly, don't bother checking frequently.

Again, in theory.

Google's Official Stance: They Ignore Both

Google has been remarkably direct about this. In multiple public statements, blog posts, and conference appearances, Google engineers have confirmed that Google ignores both <priority> and <changefreq>.

The reasoning is straightforward: these values are self-reported by site owners, and site owners are unreliable reporters of their own content's importance.

The problem with self-reported priority is obvious. If you tell every webmaster they can rank their pages from 0.0 to 1.0, what happens? Everyone sets their important pages to 1.0 and their less important pages to 0.8. The signal becomes meaningless because there's no calibration across sites. Your 0.8 and my 0.8 mean completely different things.

Changefreq has a similar problem. Site owners tend to be optimistic about how often their content changes. A page marked daily might actually change once a month. Google would rather observe actual change frequency through its own crawling than trust a static declaration.

How Bing Treats Priority and Changefreq

Bing's approach has been more nuanced. While Bing hasn't been as explicitly dismissive as Google, Bing's documentation suggests it may use these values as very weak hints when deciding crawl scheduling.

In practice, Bing's crawling behavior appears to be driven primarily by:

• Historical crawl data (how often the page actually changed in past crawls)
• The page's importance based on link signals
• The <lastmod> date (more on this below)

Whether Bing gives any meaningful weight to priority and changefreq is debatable. Most SEO practitioners who have tested this haven't found measurable differences in Bing's crawl behavior based on these tags.

Other Search Engines

Yandex and Baidu have their own crawling heuristics, and there's limited public documentation on how they handle these tags. The safe assumption is that no major search engine relies heavily on priority or changefreq for crawl decisions.

So Should You Include Them?

There are two reasonable positions:

Position 1: Leave them out. If Google ignores them and Bing barely considers them, they add bulk to your sitemap without providing value. A 50,000-URL sitemap with priority and changefreq on every entry is meaningfully larger than one without them. Stripping them out reduces file size and complexity with no SEO downside.

Position 2: Include them, but don't obsess. If your CMS or sitemap generator adds them by default, it's not worth the effort to remove them. They don't cause harm. They just don't help.

Lastmod: The Tag That Actually Matters

While Google ignores priority and changefreq, it does pay attention to <lastmod> -- the last modification date of a URL.

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/products/widget-a</loc>
  <lastmod>2025-12-15T10:30:00+00:00</lastmod>
</url>

Google uses <lastmod> as a signal for when to recrawl a URL. If Google sees that a page's lastmod has changed since the last crawl, it's more likely to recrawl that page sooner. This is particularly useful for:

• Large sites where Google can't crawl everything on every pass
• Updated content that you want re-indexed quickly
• News and time-sensitive content where freshness matters

The Catch: Lastmod Must Be Accurate

Google has explicitly said that it evaluates whether your lastmod dates are trustworthy. If you set every page's lastmod to today's date (a common mistake with poorly configured CMS setups), Google will learn that your lastmod dates are unreliable and start ignoring them.

Good lastmod practices:

What About Crawl Budget?

Priority and changefreq were originally designed to help with crawl budget allocation. But Google determines crawl budget using signals that are far more reliable:

• Site authority and link profile: More authoritative sites get more crawl budget.
• Page update frequency (observed): Google tracks how often pages actually change based on its own crawl history.
• Server response time: Faster servers get crawled more aggressively because crawling doesn't strain them.
• Internal link structure: Pages with more internal links pointing to them are crawled more frequently.

You can't shortcut crawl budget allocation with a priority tag. Google has better data about your site than you can express in a single decimal number.

Practical Recommendations

Here's what to actually do, based on how search engines behave today (not how the protocol was designed in 2005):

The Bottom Line

Priority and changefreq are relics of a simpler web where search engines needed more help from site owners. Modern search engines have their own signals that are far more reliable. The Sitemap Protocol keeps these tags in the spec for backward compatibility, but the major search engines have moved past them.

If you're spending time choosing between 0.7 and 0.8 for your product pages, stop. Spend that time making sure your lastmod dates are accurate instead. That's the one sitemap metadata field that actually influences how search engines crawl your site.

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Google ignores priority and changefreq. Focus on what actually matters: accurate lastmod dates.