The two tags everyone adds and Google mostly ignores
If you've ever built a sitemap by hand or copied a template, you've seen <priority> and <changefreq> sitting in almost every <url> entry. They look important — a number between 0.0 and 1.0, a word like "daily" or "monthly" — so it's natural to assume Google uses them to decide what to crawl first. It largely doesn't.
What priority actually does
The <priority> tag was meant to tell search engines which pages on your site matter most relative to each other. In practice, site owners set nearly everything to 0.8 or 0.9 to seem important, which made the signal useless at scale. Google has said for years that it largely disregards this tag, and ranking or crawl frequency isn't meaningfully affected by the number you choose.
What changefreq actually does
<changefreq> was meant to hint at how often a page's content changes — daily, weekly, monthly — so crawlers could allocate visits accordingly. Google instead relies on its own observed pattern of how often a page's content actually changes over time, which is a far more reliable signal than a static label you set once and forget.
What actually influences crawling and indexing
<lastmod>, kept accurate and updated only when content genuinely changes — this one still carries real weight.- A clean, valid URL list free of broken links, redirects, or non-canonical pages.
- Internal linking, which tells search engines which pages you consider important far more convincingly than a priority number.
- Site structure and crawl budget, especially on larger sites where wasted crawls on low-value pages can slow discovery of new content.
How to handle it in practice
- Include
<priority>and<changefreq>if you want, but don't spend time optimizing them — they're low-risk to include and low-value to fine-tune. - Keep
<lastmod>accurate, and only update it when the page content actually changes, not on every deploy. - Focus effort on internal links and a clean URL list instead — these are the signals that actually move the needle.
Wrapping up
Priority and changefreq aren't harmful to include, but they're not where your effort should go. An accurate lastmod, a clean sitemap, and strong internal linking do far more to influence how quickly Google finds and re-crawls your content.