When I disable the “Output optimized sitemap” feature, instead I get one that is wp-sitemap.xml — which seems like the full complete sitemap. The problem is the URL is not the standard sitemap.xml so it might not be easily discoverable by search engines?
Howdy!
The Optimized sitemap reduces the number of items in the sitemap to make it more efficient. This helps search engines process the sitemap more quickly.
Search engines have a crawl budget for every website, meaning they stop crawling after several pages per day. If you include pages in the sitemap nobody wants or needs to read, such as your archives or old content, you might be pushing your good content to the back of the line.
The number of items in the sitemap corresponds to the “Sitemap Query Limit” value, which also affects the non-Optimized sitemap.
It’s important to note that for most websites, a sitemap is an outdated tool; search engines can find almost all pages via crawling. WordPress is well set up for crawling by automatically creating archives and meta-links. A breadcrumb is important to improve this further.
Search engines can discover the sitemap URL via the /robots.txt output, so the non-Optimized sitemap can also be found this way. In some cases, it’s might not be available there, and you’d have to submit your sitemap to Google and Bing manually.
You can inspect the pages Google has found on your site via Google Search Console’s Indexing Report.
I hope this explains most of the issue. You can learn more at https://tsf.fyi/kb/sitemap.