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Is there an advantage to submitting my AMP pages to my Google sitemap?

I am using <link rel="amphtml" ... but I was wondering if submitting them lead to faster discovery?

My AMP pages are starting to show up in Google Search Console Coverage for "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap"

However, I cannot confirm that their non-AMP canonicals are in the latest version of the sitemap that Google has crawled and parsed.

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Short answer: if your AMP pages are alternates of regular (non‑AMP) pages, you usually do not need to add them as separate sitemap <loc> entries — the rel="amphtml" / rel="canonical" pairing is sufficient for Google to discover and index AMP alternates. (developers.google.com)

Why you might still add them (and how)

  • Sitemaps are intended to list canonical URLs; they also support alternate annotations (xhtml:link) so you can explicitly declare an AMP alternate inside the canonical URL entry. That annotation is valid and will make the relationship explicit to crawlers. Use that when you want the sitemap to document the pairing (or when your workflows produce sitemaps centrally and you prefer the explicit signal). (developers.google.com)

When to include AMP URLs as ordinary sitemap entries

  • If AMP is your canonical format (an AMP‑only site), list the AMP URLs as canonical entries.
  • If an AMP page exists but is not linked from its canonical page (or is otherwise hard for crawlers to find), including it makes sense so Google can discover it reliably. (developers.google.com)

Practical checks and troubleshooting (apply these before changing sitemap policy)

  • Confirm each AMP page has a correct rel="canonical" back to the canonical URL and the canonical page contains rel="amphtml".
  • Run the AMP validator and ensure the AMP page is accessible to Googlebot (not blocked by robots.txt or X‑Robots headers).
  • Use Search Console’s Indexing / AMP reports and URL Inspection; if you want Google to reprocess pages sooner, resubmit the sitemap or request indexing for specific URLs. The “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” state is usually informational: Google found the page by links/rel=amphtml, not the sitemap. (developers.google.com)

Bottom line for : your sitemap approach (annotating canonical entries with an xhtml:link to the AMP URL) is perfectly acceptable and will make Search Console show the alternate in the sitemap. If you prefer minimalism, relying on rel="amphtml"/rel="canonical" alone is also a well‑supported option. (developers.google.com)

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And the Google has spoken!!

Despite lots of conflicting information on the web, and lots of articles insisting that there is no need to submit AMP pages to your sitemap, this Google article definitively says to submit AMP pages to your sitemap.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/create-URLs

Keep in mind that it's often the case that the left hand doesn't speak to the right hand with these sorts of things. In other words, just because Google's SEO team is putting out documents like this, doesn't mean that their quality search team thinks differently.

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And the Great Google has spoiken again! This time on a page that the last page linked to, with completely the opposite information. Did I call it, or what?!

So the page I linked to in my post right above says that the types of URLs you provide in your sitemaps include two types:

  • Your canonical URLs
  • Alternate URLs such as AMP pages

Then there's a link for more information.

Somehow I end up at which specifically says to list only canonical URLs in sitemaps.

Ah, but there it is!! You're supposed to annotate the sitemap URL with its alternate:

https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls#annotation-in-sitemaps

Let's see if I can figure out how to do this for my AMP pages.

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OK, I'm now adding AMP pages to my sitemap file as so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <url>
            <loc>https://www.daniweb.com/programming/software-development/threads/105/visual-basic-net</loc>
            <lastmod>2002-08-01</lastmod>
            <changefreq>never</changefreq>
            <priority>0.5</priority>
            <xhtml:link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.daniweb.com/programming/software-development/threads/105/visual-basic-net/amp" />
        </url>
    </urlset>

I also stumbled upon a tweet by John Mu (Google's rep to the SEO community, for those not in the know) insisting that they don't need AMP pages in sitemap files.

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