Search Atlas Help Center

🗺️ Sitemap Tool, Content Genius, and robots.txt Setup

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Camilo Aponte

Camilo Aponte

Last updated on Sep 30, 2026

🗺️ Where to Find the Search Atlas Sitemap Tool

Search Atlas includes a built-in sitemap generation tool — you do not need a third-party plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math to create your sitemap. The tool is available directly inside the platform.

  1. Log in to your Search Atlas account.
  2. In the left sidebar, click Site Metrics.
  3. Select your target site from the site list.
  4. Look for the Sitemap option within the Site Metrics section for your property.

If you do not see the Sitemap option, confirm that a site has been added and verified under your account. Only verified properties expose the full set of site tools.

⚙️ How to Generate or Regenerate Your Sitemap

  1. Navigate to Site Metrics in the left sidebar and open your site.
  2. Open the Sitemap tool.
  3. Click Generate Sitemap (or Regenerate if one already exists).
  4. Wait for the process to complete — generation time depends on the size of your site.
  5. Copy the sitemap URL provided, then submit it to Google Search Console under Sitemaps to ensure Google crawls it promptly.

The output is a standard XML sitemap that lists your URLs with their last-modified dates, change frequency, and priority values — fully compatible with Google, Bing, and other search engines.

🚨 Troubleshooting: Google Reads HTML Instead of XML

If Google Search Console reports that your sitemap is being read as HTML rather than XML, the sitemap file is likely being intercepted by your hosting environment before it reaches the crawler. This is common on sites hosted behind Cloudflare or Hostinger.

Steps to resolve this:

  • Cloudflare users: Log in to Cloudflare, go to Rules → Page Rules (or Cache Rules), and add a rule to bypass cache for the URL pattern yoursite.com/sitemap*.xml. This prevents Cloudflare from serving a cached HTML version of the page.
  • Hostinger users: In hPanel, navigate to Hosting → Manage → Cache Manager and clear the full cache. Then add an exclusion for /sitemap.xml so it is never cached as HTML.
  • All hosts: Open your sitemap URL directly in a browser and view the page source. If you see standard HTML markup instead of XML tags beginning with <?xml, a caching or redirect layer is intercepting the file. Contact your host to exclude the sitemap path from caching rules.
  • Ensure the sitemap URL does not redirect through a page that loads your site theme before serving the file.

🤖 How to Edit Your robots.txt File

Your robots.txt file controls which parts of your site search engine crawlers can access. It must reference your sitemap correctly to support discovery.

To edit robots.txt on WordPress:

  1. Log in to your WordPress admin panel.
  2. Go to Settings → Reading and confirm Search engine visibility is not blocked.
  3. Use the Search Atlas Content Genius WordPress plugin (see next section) or access your site files via FTP/hosting file manager.
  4. Open or create robots.txt in your site root directory.
  5. Add the following line at the bottom, replacing the URL with your actual sitemap address:
    Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
  6. Save the file and verify it is accessible at https://yoursite.com/robots.txt in your browser.

Avoid blocking /wp-admin/ paths unnecessarily, and never block CSS or JS files that Google needs to render your pages.

🔌 How to Connect Content Genius to Your WordPress Blog

Content Genius is the Search Atlas AI writing assistant. Connecting it to WordPress lets you publish optimised content directly from the platform.

  1. In the left sidebar, click Content to expand the section.
  2. Open Content → Content Genius (page title: "What are we writing today?") at /content/seo-content-assistant.
  3. Inside the editor, locate the WordPress Integration or Publish option (top-right area of the editor toolbar).
  4. Click Connect WordPress and enter your WordPress site URL.
  5. Install the Search Atlas plugin on your WordPress site by uploading the plugin .zip provided by Search Atlas in WordPress → Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, then activate it.
  6. Copy the API key displayed in Search Atlas and paste it into the plugin settings inside WordPress under Settings → Search Atlas.
  7. Return to Search Atlas and click Verify Connection. A success message confirms the integration is live.

Once connected, you can draft content inside the SEO Content Assistant and publish or save it as a draft directly to your WordPress blog without leaving Search Atlas.

📋 Understanding Google Instant Indexing and Plan Limits

Google Instant Indexing (also called Indexing API or One-Click Indexing) is a premium feature that is not included on all Search Atlas plans. It allows you to request immediate indexing of a URL through the Google Indexing API rather than waiting for Googlebot to crawl it organically.

  • Check your current plan by going to your Avatar (top-right) → Billing → Plans & Top-ups to see which features are included.
  • If Instant Indexing is not shown in your dashboard, it means your current plan does not include it.
  • To unlock this feature, upgrade your plan from the Billing section or speak with our team about the right plan for your needs.
  • As an alternative, you can manually submit URLs for indexing through Google Search Console → URL Inspection → Request Indexing at no cost.

💬 Need More Help?

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.