Google's John Mueller has confirmed that HTML sitemaps remain useful for SEO — provided site owners understand they cannot replace XML sitemap files and Google cannot process them one-to-one.

Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed the topic in a recent episode of the Search Off The Record podcast, around the 17-minute mark. Their exchange settled a long-running question: are site owners locked into XML sitemaps, or do HTML sitemaps still count?

The answer is both, with clear limits.

Why HTML sitemaps can't replace XML sitemaps

Mueller explained that the two formats serve different purposes, and that confusion is common because the names sound alike.

He said: "An HTML sitemap is basically almost like a map of your website for users. It's not something that replaces an XML sitemap file."

The key technical distinction is structure. An XML sitemap follows a strict format that Google can parse and process in Search Console. An HTML sitemap does not.

"Of course, if someone is crawling your website and they find an HTML sitemap file, they can crawl those links like any other link on a website, so that's helpful," Mueller said. "But it's not the case that the HTML sitemap can be submitted as a sitemap file. It can't be processed one-to-one the same way as an XML sitemap file because it doesn't have this strict structure to it. It's basically a collection of links."

In other words: crawlers can follow an HTML sitemap's links like any other internal links, but site owners cannot submit it as a sitemap in Search Console and should not expect XML-level treatment.

How should you actually build an HTML sitemap?

Mueller's guidance cuts against the old SEO habit of listing every indexable page. He recommended building HTML sitemaps around useful navigation paths, not exhaustive link dumps.

He used an ecommerce site as his example: list the category pages, not every product.

"So if you have an e-commerce site, you wouldn't list all of your products in an HTML sitemap file. You would list maybe the categories so that people can go to the right place, but then pick out the product individually. So it's similar, but not exactly the same," Mueller said.

Splitt had framed the crawling benefit of the approach with his own question: "But that still would help crawling because from this place we can find all the links as well. It's just not as structured and clear cut as an XML sitemap, I guess." Mueller's answer: "Yes, absolutely."

A brief history of the HTML sitemap

Before XML sitemaps existed, SEOs linked to new pages internally and externally to trigger crawling and ranking. Many also added a footer link from the homepage — or every page — to an HTML sitemap containing a giant list of links to inner pages, which helped indexing and distributed PageRank. Most SEOs included only pages they wanted to rank, leaving out utility pages like About Us.

Google may also have used RSS feeds for discovery well before XML sitemaps arrived. A 2004 university research paper documented that crawlers could use RSS feeds to find new and modified pages and cut crawling bandwidth by up to 40%. But RSS adoption was never universal, which likely made it impractical as a discovery mechanism. That gap is probably why Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft agreed on the single XML sitemap standard still used today.

Should you deploy an HTML sitemap now?

Some readers will find the idea novel; others will dismiss HTML sitemaps as outdated, like directory links or reciprocal link exchanges. Mueller's comments suggest otherwise. HTML sitemaps built for users can also benefit Google: easier navigation means visitors use and recommend more pages, and Google picks up on those behavioral signals.

The practical takeaway is simple:

• Keep your XML sitemap. It remains the machine-readable, submittable standard.
• Add an HTML sitemap as a user-facing navigation layer, organized by category and topic.
• Don't list every page — focus on useful paths, especially on large ecommerce and content sites.
• Expect crawling and discovery benefits, but not XML-equivalent processing.

Site owners planning implementation should watch how Googlebot interacts with the new HTML sitemap pages in crawl stats, and track whether category-level discovery and indexation improve in Search Console over the following weeks.