Use both, but for different jobs: rely on your sitemap plus internal links for normal bulk discovery, and reserve individual URL submission for the few high-priority or stuck pages that need faster attention. The split exists because the two methods are built for different scales. The sitemap is your standing discovery mechanism that quietly handles the whole site, while individual submission is a manual nudge that does not scale but earns its place on specific pages.
The sitemap, paired with solid internal linking, is how Google should find the bulk of your new content. It is the durable, hands-off system: you publish a page, your internal links and your sitemap surface it, and Google discovers and crawls it on its regular passes. For a site adding pages routinely, this is the only sustainable approach, because there is no realistic way to hand-submit every URL and no need to. Insisting on submitting each one individually wastes effort on a process that does not keep up with publishing volume.
But “the sitemap alone is always enough” overstates it too. Some pages need a faster route, a critical landing page tied to a launch, a high-value post you want indexed quickly, or a page Google has discovered but left sitting in “crawled, not indexed” limbo. For those, Search Console’s URL Inspection and “Request indexing” gives a direct, prioritized push that the sitemap’s normal cadence will not match. Individual submission is the right tool precisely because you are using it sparingly, on the handful of URLs where speed actually matters, not as a substitute for the standing mechanism.
So set up the standing system first and treat manual submission as the exception. Keep an accurate, complete sitemap and link new pages well from existing content, and let that carry the routine flow. Then, when a page is genuinely high-priority or appears stuck, submit it individually through Search Console to push it forward. Match the method to the need: bulk through the sitemap, individual attention for the few that earn it.