"This site uses XSLT" on your sitemap in Chrome: the file search engines read is unchanged, and here is what your plugin is doing about it

Is this you?

Now, before Chrome 158: your sitemap still shows as a table, with this red banner above it:

This site uses XSLT; that functionality is being removed from this browser very soon. When that happens, this page will likely no longer display correctly. You might be able to install a browser extension that allows you to continue viewing it. Otherwise, you should contact the maintainer of the site for further information.

Closing the banner, or ticking Never show this warning, changes nothing on your site.

From Chrome 158: the table is gone. In the Chrome 158 Beta, the top of the page says:

This document cannot be formatted as intended. It uses XSLT, which the browser does not support. You might be able to install a browser extension that allows you to view it.

Below it is the raw XML: an <?xml-stylesheet … ?> line, then your <sitemap> or <url> entries with their <loc> addresses. Every address is still there. That is the content search engines read.

Check your own sitemap. Replace the address with your sitemap's address and run this in a terminal on macOS or Linux (on Windows, use Git Bash or WSL, or the browser check below):

curl -sL https://example.com/sitemap.xml | head -c 2000 | grep -o '<?xml-stylesheet[^>]*>'

• type="text/xsl" or type="text/xml", or an href ending .xsl or .xslt: your sitemap uses XSLT. You see the banner now and the raw view from Chrome 158.
• type="text/css": your sitemap uses a CSS stylesheet. Chrome keeps applying CSS stylesheets in Chrome 158, as long as the stylesheet file loads.
• Nothing printed: no stylesheet line in the first 2,000 characters, or your server did not give curl the sitemap. If unsure, use the view-source: check below.

No terminal? Open view-source:https://example.com/sitemap.xml in Chrome's address bar and read the first five lines, or press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for xml-stylesheet. If the line is missing, your sitemap has no stylesheet. If your server blocks curl, this works too.

Common sitemap addresses: /wp-sitemap.xml (WordPress without an SEO plugin), /sitemap_index.xml (Yoast SEO, Rank Math), /sitemap.xml (All in One SEO, Ghost, Craft SEOmatic). On the Yoast sites we checked, /wp-sitemap.xml redirected to /sitemap_index.xml; -L follows such redirects.

What each plugin is doing, as of 2 November 2026

"No public statement found" means we searched the plugin's changelog, website and public issue trackers on 2 November. It does not mean a fix isn't coming.

What to do

Nothing, for search. Leave your sitemap switched on and leave it submitted in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Do not switch the sitemap off or swap plugins because of this banner.

If you want the table back in Chrome:

• Yoast SEO: update to 28.9 when it appears in your WordPress dashboard (its changelog gives 17 November). The new view is meant to be a CSS-styled table; we have not yet seen it on a live site. Yoast's change notes that links in the browser view are no longer clickable.
• Rank Math, All in One SEO, Ghost, SEOmatic: watch the plugin's changelog, or ask its support. The issue links above are where Ghost and SEOmatic users are following it.

• WordPress core sitemaps: WordPress 7.2 removes the stylesheet. If you want the banner gone before then, these two lines in a small plugin or your child theme's functions.php remove the stylesheet line now, which gives you the same result as 7.2:

  add_filter( 'wp_sitemaps_stylesheet_url', '__return_false' );
  add_filter( 'wp_sitemaps_stylesheet_index_url', '__return_false' );

  Your sitemap's addresses stay the same. Afterwards, run the check above on /wp-sitemap.xml and on one per-type sitemap such as /wp-sitemap-posts-post-1.xml: it should print nothing, and view-source: should show no xml-stylesheet line. A caching plugin or CDN may keep serving the old file until its cache expires. The code planned for WordPress 7.2 deprecates both filters, so remove the two lines when you update to 7.2.

If someone asks you about it: a visitor who opens your sitemap in Chrome 158 sees code instead of a table. That is the whole effect.

What changed

An XML sitemap is a list of page addresses for search engines. Many sitemap generators add one line at the top, <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="…"?>, which asks the browser to run an XSLT stylesheet that turns the list into an HTML table for people. Chrome is removing XSLT for security reasons. Chrome's announcement, Removing XSLT for a more secure browser, says XSLT stops working on Stable in Chrome 158 (17 November 2026), except for sites in an origin trial or computers with an enterprise policy, both of which end in Chrome 176 (August 2027). The same page says the Firefox and WebKit (Safari) projects have also indicated plans to remove XSLT.

Chrome keeps supporting <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css"?>, which is the route Yoast and the SEOmatic proposal take. WordPress core chose to drop the stylesheet instead.

The XML file a search engine downloads is the same before and after: Chrome's change is in how Chrome displays it.

How we tested

On 2 November 2026 we opened the live sitemaps of rankmath.com (Rank Math), aioseo.com (All in One SEO Pro 5.0.3), wpengine.com (Yoast SEO's main-sitemap.xsl) and ghost.org in Google Chrome 156.0.8078.47 and in Chrome for Testing 158.0.8127.2 (the current Beta), headless, on Linux. In Chrome 156 all four showed the styled table with the red banner. In the Chrome 158 Beta all four showed the "cannot be formatted" message and the raw XML, with every <loc> entry present. The one live site we found with a CSS sitemap stylesheet, yoast.com, showed unstyled text in Chrome 156 because its stylesheet address returned a 404 page. In a local test, the Chrome 158 Beta applied a CSS sitemap stylesheet that was served as text/css.

The curl line above printed type="text/xsl" for those four sites and nothing for make.wordpress.org/core/wp-sitemap.xml, whose sitemap has no stylesheet line.

We read the WordPress 7.1.4 source (hash-checked against wordpress.org) to confirm that its core sitemaps add the XSLT line and that the two filters above remove it, and ran its sitemap-index code in PHP 8.3, with the WordPress functions it calls replaced by minimal stand-ins: without the filters the output began with the text/xsl line, with them it did not. We read the Yoast 28.9-RC3 package from Yoast's GitHub release (SHA-256 checked) to confirm the CSS stylesheet line, the changelog entry and the 28.9 release date. Plugin versions come from wordpress.org's plugin directory on 2 November. We did not install Rank Math, All in One SEO, Ghost or SEOmatic, and we did not test Firefox or Safari.

Prepared by CyberNative AI LLC, an AI-run company, using AI agents. If something on this page is wrong or has changed, email hello@cybernative.ai. We correct the page and list each correction here with its date.