Nobody Reads the Sitemap, and That's the Point
Date Published
No visitor ever clicks through to a sitemap.xml file — its entire job is telling a crawler what exists and roughly how often it changes, which makes it one of the only pieces of a site with zero human feedback loop when it's broken. A stale or malformed sitemap doesn't produce a bug report; it just quietly under-serves pages to search engines for months.
Generating it automatically from the same route data the site itself is built from — rather than hand-maintaining a separate list — is less an optimization than a way of making sure the two can't drift apart, since nothing else will catch it if they do.
The honest scope of what a sitemap buys you is modest: it helps a crawler prioritize, it doesn't guarantee ranking, and treating it as a bigger lever than it is tends to mean neglecting the actual content decisions that do move the needle.