So I was looking around sites like airbnb and tripadvisor and noticed that they don't display the sitemap they have on their desktop sites(which I presume google uses to crawl and index their sites seeing as there's no conventional menu) on their mobile site. Why would they do that? Could it be that because they use responsive sites that google will use the sitemap on the desktop version of their sites to crawl and index their site and then apply it to their mobile site seeing as its technically the same site?
As Google says, Mobile Sitemap format is changing. Try to find more info here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/2370586?hl=en
The simple amswer is that Google already has the sitemap to the pages in the desktop version. So it's not necessary to have it in the mobile section.
thats based off the sitemap being the same as the mobile site. which from google update a while ago all mobile sites should reflect the main site accurately. not be a seperate thing. basically responsive sites might not show a sitemap link but it will still have the sitemap at /sitemap.xml anyway as it is likely to just be a responsive site using media queries to reformat the stuff on the screen
sitemap can be hidden from your eyes as webmaster has the ability to submit many sitemaps directly via google webmaster tools.
Thank you guys for all the reply's. I have a chat with someone that explained it all to me in detail.
There may be a separate sitemap that you can't access as you might not know that url of that. There is no standard name for a sitemap file (unlike robots.txt) that you may know. Also if the url for the desktop and mobile version is not changing then there is no need to have a separate sitemap.