As per Google, a sitemap can contain a maximum of 50000 URLs with a maximum size of 50 MB (Uncompressed). If you have a bigger website having thousands of URLs, you may require to exclude image URLs from the sitemap to fit the validation or you need to breakdown the list in multiple sitemaps. SEOs may want sometimes to focus only on crawling pages and not the images. It’s because Google automatically indexes images when it indexes the pages. And thus, you may want Google to focus on your pages prior to images. So, you need to remove image URL from sitemap.xml in Magento 2.
The easy-to-follow steps mentioned below will remove the image URLs and not allow search engine bots to crawl them!
Steps to Remove Image URL from sitemap.xml in Magento 2:
- Login to admin panel
- Navigate to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > XML Sitemap
- Expand Product Options
- Set “None” to Add Images into Sitemap

Can it be any simpler!
You can also refer to Remove Image URL from sitemap.xml in Magento 2 from our Magento 2 video tutorial series:
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Thanks.