An image sitemap lists the images on your pages so search engines can find them — even ones loaded by JavaScript or lazy loading that crawlers might miss.

When it helps

  • Images loaded via JS, galleries or lazy loading.
  • Sites that rely on image search traffic (recipes, products, stock photos).

What goes in it

Inside your normal sitemap, each page can list its images with <image:image> and <image:loc> entries pointing at the image URLs.

Don't forget the basics

A sitemap only helps discovery — ranking still needs good alt text, descriptive filenames, and fast, compressed images. To actually rank, see Google Images SEO.