Exclude posts from WordPress’s Sitemap

Starting with 5.5, WordPress now generates its own sitemap.xml without the need of a plugin. It’s possible to filter the results to exclude a specific post using the below filter:

function remove_page_from_sitemap ($args, $post_type ) {
if ($post_type === "page") {
$posts_not_in = [ 1234 ];

if ( isset($args['post__not_in']) ) {
$posts_not_in = array_merge( $posts_not_in, $args['post__not_in'] );
}

$args['post__not_in'] = $posts_not_in;
}

return $args;
}

add_filter( 'wp_sitemaps_posts_query_args', 'remove_page_from_sitemap', 10, 2);

That filter takes a familiar WP_Query argument, so it’s quite simple to add any additional filters, for example if you wanted to exclude posts from a specific term or from specific authors, using any existing WP_Query parameters.