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XML Sitemap & Hreflang

Overview

AI Boost for Joomla generates a dynamic XML sitemap and injects hreflang tags — both in the page <head> and in the sitemap itself — for multilingual Joomla installations.

Enabling the XML Sitemap

Go to XML Sitemap and set Enable XML Sitemap to Yes. Your sitemap is immediately available at:

https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

No server configuration, no .htaccess changes, and no additional plugins are required. The sitemap is generated dynamically and cached.

What the Sitemap Includes

By default, the sitemap includes:

  • Articles — all published Joomla articles
  • Category pages — all published article categories
  • Menu items — all public menu items and their linked pages

Each URL entry includes:

  • <loc> — the canonical URL
  • <lastmod> — the last modification date from Joomla's database

Articles also carry <image:image> children when image entries are on, and multilingual sites carry xhtml:link hreflang alternates.

AI Boost writes no <priority> and no <changefreq> — and there is no setting for either. Google's documentation says it ignores both. Bing says they do not influence how or when your content is crawled. Writing them would add noise to every URL and change nothing, so the sitemap leaves them out. If you are moving from another extension that wrote them, nothing is lost.

Above 2,000 URLs the sitemap hands off to a sitemap index and serves the URLs in chunks, automatically and on both editions — a single file that large is slow enough to risk timing out. There is nothing to configure.

Excluding Content

To keep a page out of the sitemap, use the per-article override fields (via Joomla Custom Fields), or set the rule on the Pages screen — its Overview row is where an article, a category page or a menu page is excluded, and where you can see which rule is already acting on it.

Instant Indexing on Publish (IndexNow)

When you publish or update an article, AI Boost can notify search engines instantly through IndexNow — the open protocol supported by Bing, Yandex and others for on-demand re-crawling. Google and Bing both retired their old sitemap "ping" endpoints, so IndexNow is the current way to prompt a fast re-crawl. See IndexNow to enable it.

Hreflang for Multilingual Sites (Pro + Multilang add-on)

For Joomla sites with multiple languages installed, AI Boost generates hreflang tags that tell search engines which language version of a page to show to which users.

Hreflang output needs an active Pro plan and the Multilang add-on, and it starts once you publish a second content language. On a single-language site nothing is emitted, which is correct — hreflang describes alternates, and there are none.

In the page <head>

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://yoursite.com/en/about" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://yoursite.com/de/about" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://yoursite.com/about" />

In the sitemap

<url>
  <loc>https://yoursite.com/en/about</loc>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://yoursite.com/en/about"/>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://yoursite.com/de/about"/>
</url>

AI Boost reads your installed Joomla languages and generates the correct IETF language tags automatically — including region codes like en-GB, pt-BR, and zh-CN.

The XML Sitemap Screen

XML Sitemap is one screen of numbered sections, not a strip of sub-tabs:

  1. XML Sitemap — the master switch, and the address your sitemap is served at.
  2. Content to Include — articles, category pages, menu pages and Joomla tag pages.
  3. Splitting a large sitemap — the URL limit per file. Above 2,000 URLs the index appears by itself, with nothing to set.
  4. Submitting your sitemap — where to hand the address to Google and Bing.
  5. Google News Sitemap (Pro) — a news sitemap for publishers, with its publication name and its news window.
  6. Image Entries & hreflang (Pro) — <image:image> children for article images, and the hreflang status for this site.
  7. Live sitemap.xml Preview — the first lines of what is being served right now.

There is no per-type priority and no change-frequency control on this screen, because the sitemap writes neither element.

Submitting to Search Engines

After enabling the sitemap, submit it to:

  • Google Search Console — go to Search Console → Sitemaps → add your sitemap URL
  • Bing Webmaster Tools — go to Sitemaps → Submit sitemap

Once submitted, search engines re-crawl it automatically whenever it changes. To prompt a faster re-crawl when you publish, enable IndexNow — AI Boost then notifies IndexNow-participating engines (Bing, Yandex and others) on every article publication.