What's new in Indexation 5.0, the update to XML Sitemap Generator for Google

XML Sitemap Generator for Google has been a WordPress plugin since 2005. Version 5.0 is the biggest change to it in years: it is renamed Indexation by Auctollo, and it covers more of the road between "your content exists" and "search engines and AI systems have found it".

This post summarises what changes when you update from 4.x. The full detail is in the changelog on the WordPress.org plugin page and in the plugin's readme.txt.

Nothing you rely on goes away

The upgrade is automatic, and a normal upgrade needs no action from you.

• Your settings carry over. Every sm_options key is kept, and a migration pass on first load brings in any individual options that 4.1.x stored outside the main array.
• Your sitemap URL still works, including a custom sitemap filename if you set one.
• Your hooks still fire. Every v4 filter and action name is still supported, and 5.0 adds new ones, all documented in the developer hook reference.
• The WordPress.org slug is unchanged, so existing installs update in place.

The plugin now lives under a new top-level Indexation menu instead of Settings, with tabs for Overview, Sitemap, Crawler Control, Notifications and Tools.

What is new

IndexNow

When you publish or update content, the plugin submits the URLs through the IndexNow protocol, which Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver support. Submissions that fail are queued and retried by a cron job every 15 minutes. You choose which public post types trigger a submission, and there are Check Key and Regenerate Key buttons for the key file.

LLMs.txt and AI agent discovery

A basic /llms.txt index helps AI systems find the structure of your content. Two discovery files, /.well-known/agents.json and /.well-known/agent-card.json, are available too; they are off by default.

Control over AI crawlers

You can block AI crawlers one by one, or all at once, and the rules are written into robots.txt. A Content-Signal directive lets you state your preferences for search, AI input and AI training.

A robots.txt editor and redirects

The virtual robots.txt editor adds to what WordPress and other plugins already output. The redirect manager supports 301, 302, 307, 308, 410 and 451 responses, and the 404 log lets you turn a broken-link candidate into a redirect with one click.

A broader sitemap

The sitemap now covers custom taxonomies, authors, date archives and every public custom post type. Exclusions work per tag, per author and per role, as well as per post and per category. Hreflang annotations are added automatically when WPML, Polylang or TranslatePress is active. An opt-in standalone image sitemap, an RSS sitemap at /sitemap.rss and an opt-in multisite network sitemap are included.

For large sites

Sites with more than about 100,000 posts get a resumable builder, which does the work in small steps across cron ticks instead of one request that can time out. It is opt-in, and a WP-CLI command, wp sitemap resumable, lets you run and inspect it.

What was removed

• The old ping system. Google and Bing retired their sitemap ping endpoints, so 5.0 replaces them with IndexNow. The old hooks still exist but do nothing.
• <changefreq> and <priority>. Google ignores both, so sitemaps now carry only <loc> and <lastmod>.
• The sm_ping_daily cron event. If you hooked your own code to it, that code will stop running.

If you wrote code against the plugin

Read the "Breaking for developers" section of the upgrade guide. The short version: the large core class was split into smaller ones, the text domain is now google-sitemap-generator everywhere, and some stored data moved. For options, use gsg_get_sm_option() and gsg_update_sm_option() rather than reading sm_options directly.

Rolling back

If 5.0 misbehaves on your site, you can go back to 4.1.23 from the WordPress.org version history, and your settings are preserved. Please post in the support forum first so we can fix what broke.

You can get the plugin from the WordPress.org plugin page.