Most websites place their XML sitemap at the root level: yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. This is the standard convention and where Google expects to find it. Some sites use sitemap_index.xml as the main file when they have multiple sub-sitemaps (for posts, pages, categories, products, etc.), which then point to individual sitemaps like sitemap-posts.xml or sitemap-pages.xml. The easiest way to locate your sitemap is to check your robots.txt file at yoursite.com/robots.txt. Most sites include a Sitemap directive there, like "Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml". You can also check Google Search Console under Indexing > Sitemaps to see which URLs you've submitted. If you're on WordPress, popular SEO plugins like Yoast, Rank Math, or All in One SEO automatically generate sitemaps at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml and reference them in robots.txt. Physically, the sitemap file lives in your server's public root directory (often called public_html, www, or htdocs). For WordPress sites, it's dynamically generated by the plugin rather than being a static file you can FTP into. For custom or static sites, you may need to manually create and upload sitemap.xml to the root. Key things to verify: - The sitemap URL returns a 200 status code, not a 404. - It's properly formatted XML (open it in a browser to check for errors). - It's listed in robots.txt so crawlers can discover it automatically. - It's submitted in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. At Ottawa SEO, we audit sitemap setup during every technical SEO review. We've seen sites where the sitemap exists but isn't referenced anywhere, or where old CMS migrations left orphaned sitemap files in subdirectories. Always double-check that your canonical sitemap location matches what you've submitted to search engines and what your robots.txt declares.