The Google sitemap has just released three additional functionalities to control the Googlebot. The feedback cycle is now complete, you submit a sitemap to tell the Googlebot what pages are on your site, and the googlebot now tells you what it does and finds on your site.

Googlebot activity reports

The google sitemap pages now include graphs of Googlebots activity on your site. Number of pages crawled a day, speed of the pages found, kbytes downloaded per day.

Crawl Rate Control

Is your site overwhelmed by continuous googlebot queries ? Google sitemap now lets you control the speed of the Googlebot.

Number of URLs submitted

In addition to giving you any errors, like pages not found, timeouts and unreachables URLs, you now get a confirmation of total number of pages submitted through your sitemap, as well as total number of pages crawled.

[Via Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Learn more about Googlebot's crawl of your site and more!]