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
<changefreq> — how often the content typically changes
<priority> — relative importance (0.1 to 1.0)

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 exclude specific articles or categories from the sitemap, use the per-article override fields (via Joomla Custom Fields) or the category and menu exclusion lists on XML Sitemap → Exclusions. The exclusion lists are a Pro feature.

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.

Advanced Sitemap Settings (Pro)

XML Sitemap → Advanced holds the settings that a Pro licence unlocks:

Setting	Description
Per-type priorities	Separate `<priority>` values for the home page, articles, categories and tags
Include tag URLs	Add Joomla tag pages to the sitemap
Image entries	Add `<image:image>` entries for article images
Google News entries	A news sitemap for publishers
Max URLs per sitemap	Chunk size for large sites

Change frequency is on XML Sitemap → Content. The priority defaults are home page 1.0, articles 0.8, categories 0.6, tags 0.4.

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.