People bring up sitemaps like they're a project. Something you build, then submit to Google, then remember to update every time a page changes. It's on half the SEO checklists floating around for small business owners.
On Cantrip, there's nothing to build. Every site already has one, live at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml from the moment it goes up, and it stays current on its own.
What's actually in there. Your homepage is listed first, marked as changing weekly, with the highest priority the file allows. Every other page gets added too, marked monthly with a slightly lower priority. Blog posts and anything else living in a collection get their own entries the same way. None of that is something you configure by hand. It's set automatically based on what kind of page it is.
robots.txt exists too, at yoursite.com/robots.txt, and it does exactly what a robots.txt is supposed to do: tell search engines they're free to crawl everything, then point them straight at the sitemap. Nothing clever, which is the point.
Not everything makes the list, on purpose. A password-protected page never shows up. There's not much reason to tell Google to crawl a page nobody outside your team can actually open. And any page where you've checked "Exclude from search engines" in that page's SEO settings gets left out too. That one checkbox does two things at once: it pulls the page from the sitemap, and it adds a tag to the page itself telling any search engine that stumbles onto it anyway to skip indexing it.
That checkbox is worth knowing exists. Use it on a thank-you page after someone submits a form, or a page you're testing that isn't ready for the world to find on its own. Neither one needs to show up in search results, and now neither one does.
Here's the honest gap: that setting lives on pages right now, not on individual blog posts. If you want one specific old post pulled out of search results, unpublishing or deleting it is still the only lever. Worth knowing before you assume the control reaches every corner of the site.
None of this replaces the actual work behind ranking well: writing pages worth finding, getting your business listed where people actually search. But the plumbing everyone assumes takes a plugin or a checklist item is already running underneath every Cantrip site. One less thing on the list.