Google's John Mueller said HTML sitemaps are a map of a site for people and do not replace the XML sitemap that Google uses for crawling and indexing. He suggested linking top level categories rather than every page, since listing every product offers little value.
Why it matters to multifamily marketers
On an apartment site, this means an on page sitemap should route renters to floor plans, neighborhood pages and FAQs, while the XML sitemap stays the clean technical feed for search engines.