AI Communication Standards Glossary

AI Sitemap

A site-defined JSON index that explains what a website contains and how its canonical pages, datasets, and public AI resources connect.

Also known as: ai-sitemap.json, AI content index, structured content index

An AI sitemap is an optional, site-defined JSON content index. It can list canonical resources with their titles, content types, descriptions, topics, dates, and useful relationships. It does not replace sitemap.xml, which remains the standard crawler discovery file, and it does not guarantee that an AI product will request, retrieve, cite, index, or rank a page. An AI sitemap is most useful when a website has several content families or public data resources that are hard to understand from URLs alone. Generate it from the same canonical content source as the site's other discovery files, link to it from a manifest or llms.txt, and verify every published destination so the index cannot drift away from the live website.

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Related Terms

  • llms.txt — A plain-text file placed at a website's root that gives AI language models a concise, human-readable overview of what the site is and what it contains.
  • llm.json — A structured JSON file that provides machine-parseable identity and metadata about a website, designed for AI systems, data pipelines, and retrieval tools.
  • Entity Map — A structured inventory of the real-world entities (people, organizations, concepts, topics) that a website covers, with their definitions and relationships.
  • Structured Data — Information organized in a consistent, machine-readable format that AI systems can parse reliably without inferring meaning from visual layout or prose.

Further Reading