It is generated once, then quietly ages: pages get added, routes get renamed, old URLs stay listed. A search engine takes the file at face value — including the parts that are no longer true.
Pages we reached by following your own links, but that the sitemap never mentions. A crawler with a smaller budget than ours may never get to them.
URLs that answer with 404, redirect somewhere else, or carry noindex. Every one of them spends crawl budget on nothing and makes the whole file less trustworthy.
Search engines use it to decide what to re-fetch, but only while it stays believable. All entries carrying the same date is the tell-tale sign of a build timestamp rather than a change date — and it devalues the field for the whole file.
Google confirmed it does not use this field, and Bing does the same. Carefully graded values from 1.0 down to 0.3 change nothing. Keeping them is not a mistake, just effort with no return.
Same story. Crawl frequency follows observed change, not your declaration.
Reading your sitemap is easy. Comparing it against what actually exists means crawling the site and matching both sides — which is exactly what happens in every Web Ready scan, with the covered share stated openly rather than implied.
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