# Connect your sitemap to MetaPilot

**Category:** Setup · **Estimated time:** 5 min

Your sitemap is where MetaPilot starts — it's the list of pages MetaPilot imports and generates structured data for. New to sitemaps? Read *What is a sitemap?* first. This guide gets yours connected in a few minutes.

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## Before you start

MetaPilot often discovers your sitemap automatically when you sign up, so it may already be connected. To have your generated metadata actually *served* on your site, you'll also want your domain connected to Cloudflare — see *Connect Cloudflare to MetaPilot* — but you can import and generate first and connect Cloudflare after.

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## Steps

### 1. Open your dashboard

Sign in to MetaPilot. If a sitemap was already found when you signed up, you'll see it listed — you're done. If not, you'll see a **"Finish setting up MetaPilot"** card.

### 2. Click "Set up sitemap"

Paste your sitemap URL — it's usually at `https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml`. Not sure where yours is? See *What is a sitemap?*

### 3. Validate it

Click **Validate** to have MetaPilot fetch the URL and confirm it's a real sitemap before you commit — a quick way to catch a typo.

### 4. Save & fetch

Click **Save & fetch**. MetaPilot imports your pages in the background and sends you a notification when the import finishes.

### 5. If a fetch stalls

Use **Fetch sitemap now** on the dashboard to re-trigger it. The button disables itself while a fetch is already running, so you can't queue duplicates.

### 6. What happens next

Each URL becomes a managed entry under **Optimize → Public Pages**. From there MetaPilot generates schema.org JSON-LD and Open Graph for each page — and, once Cloudflare is connected, serves them live at the edge.

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## Ready to connect your sitemap?

Sign in and set it up from your dashboard. [Get started →](https://metapilot.io/)