🔍 Overview
If your video-sitemap.xml or news-sitemap.xml returns an empty URL set — even when you have published video pages or recent news content — this article explains the most common causes and what information to have ready when escalating to support.
⚙️ Why This Happens
Empty video or news sitemaps are almost always caused by one or more of the following:
- Missing structured data: Search Atlas generates video sitemaps by reading VideoObject schema markup on your pages. If no valid schema is detected, no URLs may be included.
- Missing news metadata: News sitemaps require a publication name and date in a supported news schema or meta tag format. Pages without this data may be excluded.
- Pages not yet crawled: Newly published pages may not have been picked up by the latest crawl cycle, so the sitemap builder may have no data to include.
- Sitemap count mismatch: The OTTO dashboard count and the live sitemap file may temporarily appear out of sync while a crawl or regeneration is still in progress.
🛠️ How to Diagnose the Issue
- Open your browser and navigate directly to yoursite.com/video-sitemap.xml and yoursite.com/news-sitemap.xml.
- Check whether the files load at all. A completely blank response or a server error (such as a 403 or 404) is different from an empty
<urlset>— note which you see. - Visit one of your published video or news pages and use a schema validation tool (such as Google's Rich Results Test) to confirm that valid VideoObject or NewsArticle structured data is present.
- Check the publication date on your news pages. Dates must be within the window accepted by Google News (typically the last two days for new submissions).
✅ What to Have Ready When You Contact Support
Because resolving empty video or news sitemaps requires a backend investigation, please gather the following before reaching out so our team can act quickly:
- Your project name or domain as it appears in Search Atlas.
- The exact sitemap URLs returning empty results (e.g., yoursite.com/video-sitemap.xml).
- The URLs of specific video or news pages you expect to appear in the sitemap.
- Any error messages or status codes you see when accessing the sitemap files directly.
- The date and time you first noticed the issue.
- A note on whether structured data is present on the affected pages (you can verify this with Google's Rich Results Test).
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.