SEO · Updated June 2026
An XML sitemap is a machine-readable list of a site’s URLs that helps search engines discover and prioritize crawling. Shopify auto-generates /sitemap.xml; submit it in Google Search Console to speed up indexing of new pages.
robots.txt is a file at a site’s root that tells crawlers which areas they may access. It now also governs AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot — making it the control point for whether your content can appear in AI answers.
Technical SEO ensures search engines can crawl, render, and index a site efficiently: site speed, mobile rendering, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, canonical tags, structured data, and clean URL architecture.