Sitemap-Only Pages: Your Direct Line to AI and Search Crawlers

The landscape of digital discovery has been irrevocably rewritten. It’s no longer about what your customers see—it’s about what AI and search engines see first, fastest, and clearest. To win the Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) race, you need a precise, machine-readable channel to communicate your brand’s definitive truth without confusing the user experience.

Enter the sitemap-only page.

This technical asset is your strategic power play: a high-priority, private briefing for machines—a URL that your XML sitemap exposes directly to crawlers and Large Language Models (LLMs), but that human visitors never encounter through typical site navigation or internal search. This approach gives you surgical control over how algorithms understand and cite your brand.

Why create sitemap-only pages? The GEO imperative

Sitemap-only pages are the critical technical strategy to separate the machine's appetite for structured data from the human user's need for simplicity.

Not every piece of content should dilute your conversion funnel. Some material—like proprietary structured data, factual brand details, or technical documentation—is better optimized for extraction by AI and search crawlers.

• Guide AI Interpretation & Eliminate Hallucination:

  • Goal: Feed LLMs (like Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT) authoritative, up-to-date brand information from a single source you control.

  • Why it works: By providing a consolidated "Truth Page," you directly influence the factual grounding of AI responses, drastically reducing the chances of LLMs fabricating or misinterpreting brand details based on fragmented or outdated public web data.
    
    

• Refine AEO Signals & Build Topical Authority:

  • Goal: Strengthen your site's expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) without disrupting the primary conversion paths for users.

  • Why it works: Use these pages to house highly structured, original research, expert Q&As, or proprietary glossaries. Since these pages are still indexed, they contribute to your overall authority score, helping you outsmart the competition.

Sitemap-only pages—sometimes referred to as orphan pages—live quietly in your XML sitemap. They are not linked internally from any other content, but their inclusion in the sitemap ensures they remain visible and prioritized for search engine discovery.

Implementation guide by Platform: Turning Insight into Action

Webflow: Creating a Sitemap-Only Page

Webflow automatically generates an updated sitemap for your site every time you publish changes. By default, all pages are included unless you deliberately exclude them. Thus, our goal in Webflow is to create a page that remains indexable (included in the sitemap) but is deliberately not linked anywhere visible on the site.

• Complexity Level: Easy-Moderate. Webflow offers an intuitive UI toggle for sitemap indexing, making the main challenge simply ensuring the page is not linked anywhere else on the site.

Static Pages

1. Create Your Page: Build your new static page in the Webflow Designer. Populate the content with the precise, structured data you want crawlers to absorb.
   
   

2. Keep It Indexable (Sitemap Inclusion): Navigate to the Page Settings → SEO Settings, and ensure the “Sitemap indexing” toggle is ON (default). This is the explicit signal to Webflow's system to include the page URL in the generated /sitemap.xml file.
   
   

3. Exclude from Search: Check the “Exclude from site search results” setting in Page Settings. This prevents internal users who utilize Webflow's search component from accidentally surfacing the technical page.
   
   

4. Hide It from Users (Navigation Exclusion): Do not link this page in your main navbar, footer, or any explicit on-site content element. Excluding internal linking from all navigation points is what ensures that the page is hidden from human users.
   
   

5. Publish Your Site: Publishing your change to triggers Webflow to rebuild and submit your updated sitemap.xml to search engines.

Make sure to verify that your URL is listed. Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and confirm the exact URL of your sitemap-only page is listed there.

CMS Pages

1. Create a CMS Collection Item: Add a new entry in your CMS Collection (e.g., a "Data Record" or "API Endpoint Detail"). Structure the content specifically for machine readability.
   
   

2. Control Visibility: Add a Boolean field (e.g., “Show in Navigation” or “Visible in Lists”) to your CMS Collection. Toggle this field OFF for your sitemap-only item.
   
   

3. Filter Display (Critical Step): In all of your Collection Lists that display this content on your live site, use the Filter option in the Designer panel to show only items where the "Show in Navigation" field Is Set to ON. This ensures the hidden CMS item is excluded from all visible feeds and lists.
   
   

4. Check Indexing Settings: Navigate to the Collection Template's SEO settings to ensure the entire template is set for index, follow (which is standard) so that the crawler is allowed to view the content.
   
   

5. Publish and Verify: Publishing the site makes the content live. The CMS item URL should appear in your yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, but remain hidden from all front-end collection displays.

WordPress: Creating a Sitemap-Only Page

WordPress has included a native XML sitemap since version 5.5, which automatically lists all public content. However, reliably hiding content from the front-end typically requires custom filtering or a robust SEO plugin. Our goal is to leverage the native sitemap inclusion while using the platform's filtering tools to prevent front-end display.

• Complexity Level: Moderate. WordPress requires either a robust SEO plugin or custom code in the theme/functions to exclude content from loops, making it less intuitive than some no-code builders.

Static Pages

1. Add a New Page: Go to Pages → Add New and write your sitemap-only content. Keep visibility Public. This ensures the page is accessible to crawlers.
   
   

2. Allow Indexing: Ensure your general Settings → Reading does not have "Discourage search engines" checked. This confirms overall site visibility.
   
   

3. Sitemap Control (SEO Plugin): If using a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, navigate to the page's advanced settings. Set the directive "Allow search engines to show this Page?" to Yes (to keep it indexable) and ensure the specific setting to exclude it from the sitemap is OFF (so it stays in the sitemap).
   
   

4. Hide from Navigation: Do not include the page in Appearance → Menus, and rigorously avoid linking it contextually from any other page's body text or sidebar widgets.
   
   

5. Optional: Hide from On-Site Search: Use a lightweight plugin like Search Exclude or a custom PHP snippet in functions.php to filter out the page ID from the WordPress internal search query results.
   
   

6. Verify: Check your sitemap (typically at yourdomain.com/wp-sitemap.xml or your plugin's sitemap URL) to confirm the page is listed for crawlers.

CMS Posts

1. Create a New Post: Go to Posts → Add New and publish it normally. Structure the content for maximum LLM readability (e.g., using bulleted fact lists).
   
   

2. Exclude It from Listings (Tag/Category): Create a specific, non-user-facing Category or Tag (e.g., ai-only). Assign this category/tag only to the post you want to hide.
   
   

3. Modify Theme Loops (Critical Step): This requires developer knowledge. You must modify the main PHP query (WP_Query) of your theme's post loops (e.g., on the blog index, archive pages, or "Recent Posts" widgets) to explicitly exclude any post assigned to the ai-only category/tag from the display. This is how you prevent it from ever being seen in the feed.
   
   

4. Keep It Indexable: Double-check your SEO plugin's settings to ensure the Post type remains allowed to be indexed and included in the sitemap.
   
   

5. Verify: The hidden post must appear in the sitemap but be reliably filtered out of your main blog feed and category archives for all human visitors.

Framer: Creating a Sitemap-Only Page

Framer automatically generates an XML sitemap for all published pages and CMS items that are set to be visible to search engines. Framer's design-first interface offers direct, native toggles to control both sitemap inclusion and front-end search visibility. Our goal is to use the native indexing toggle while preventing user discovery.

• Complexity Level: Easy. Framer, being design-focused, makes navigation and search exclusion an easy, built-in setting alongside the standard SEO toggle.

Static Pages

1. Create Your Page: Build the new page content in Framer, focusing on clean, well-structured sections for AI.
   
   

2. Indexing: In the Page Settings panel, ensure “Show page in search engines” is ON. This is Framer’s native sitemap inclusion setting, which ensures the URL is included in the output sitemap.xml.
   
   

3. Hide It from Navigation and Search: Directly below the indexing toggle, make sure “Show page in Site Search” is OFF. Furthermore, manually ensure that this page is not linked in any visible navigation menus or footer links.
   
   

4. Publish: Publishing the site finalizes the sitemap generation process, adding the indexable URL.
   
   

5. Verify: Check your published site's yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to confirm inclusion.

CMS Items

1. Add a CMS Entry: Create a new blog post or other collection item that holds your structured data.
   
   

2. Index Settings: Ensure “Show page in search engines” is enabled for the entire CMS template, which allows the collection item to be added to the sitemap.
   
   

3. Filter Display (Critical Step): Add a custom Boolean field (e.g., "Exclude from Feed" or "Internal Only") to your CMS. In every instance of your CMS Collection List display element, use the Filter option to exclude items where this custom field is set to True.
   
   

4. Publish: Framer publishes all CMS entries; your item will be discoverable via sitemap but invisible in collection feeds and listings due to the filter logic.

Shopify: Creating a Sitemap-Only Page

Shopify automatically generates XML sitemaps for all published pages, products, collections, and blog posts. Our goal is to rely on this automatic sitemap inclusion but use Liquid code (Shopify's templating language) to hide content from customer-facing template loops.

• Complexity Level: Moderate-Difficult. Shopify is highly geared toward e-commerce pages. Hiding a non-product page from the user flow while keeping it indexable often requires editing the Liquid theme files, which is a developer task.

Static Pages

1. Create a New Page: In Online Store → Pages, build your sitemap-only page (e.g., a technical warranty policy). Publish it to ensure it's live and indexable.
   
   

2. Visibility: Keep visibility Visible—Shopify automatically adds all published static pages to your pages sitemap index.
   
   

3. Hide It from Shoppers: The essential step is to omit the page from all menus in Online Store → Navigation. Also, avoid any hardcoded links in the theme's footer or body code.
   
   

4. Verify: Visit your sitemap to confirm inclusion.

CMS Blog Posts

1. Create the Post: Go to Online Store → Blog Posts and add your content.
   
   

2. Publish It and Tag: Keep the post Visible so Shopify includes it in the sitemap. Add a specific tag to the post, like internal or ai-data.
   
   

3. Edit Theme File (Technical Step): This is the most complex step. Access your theme code (Online Store → Themes → Actions → Edit Code). Locate the relevant Liquid file (e.g., main-blog.liquid). You must modify the post iteration loop to include an unless condition that filters out posts with your specific tag ({% unless post.tags contains 'ai-data' %).
   
   

4. Verify: Your post remains in yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml but is filtered out of your live blog feed for customers.

From Hidden Page to Strategic Asset

Why does this all matter? Because you’re no longer just optimizing for keywords — you’re building a relationship with AI through Yolando’s GEO framework.

Sitemap-only pages give you and Yolando a tool to feed AI models clear, concise information about your brand, products, or points of view without adding noise to your user experience. It’s about shaping your digital narrative with intention — and Yolando makes that process precise, scalable, and measurable.

You don’t need more data dashboards telling you there’s a problem; you need Yolando’s map to the solution. This is one of those small technical steps with a huge strategic impact — a way to move from simply being visible to being understood, and ultimately, being chosen.