How do search engines use sitemaps?

Question

Accepted Answer

Web crawlers use a sitemap to understand a website’s structure so they can evaluate and rank it more easily.

Answer

Google uses a sitemap to locate structured data on a web page and display it in rich results.

Answer

Web crawlers use a sitemap to follow backlinks from one site to another and assign authority to those pages.

Answer

Search engines don’t use sitemaps, but SEO experts use them to determine the information architecture of a website.