Why is my sitemap showing errors in Google Search Console?
Sitemaps
Each submitted sitemap gets one of three statuses in the Sitemaps report: Success, Has errors (Google read the file but some entries failed, and the valid URLs are still queued) or Couldn't fetch (Google never got the file). Click the sitemap's row to see the specific errors. Nearly all of them come down to an unreachable file, malformed XML, URLs that don't belong in that sitemap, or a file over the limits of 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed.
"Couldn't fetch": Google never read the file
Google's Sitemaps report help lists these causes:
- robots.txt blocks the sitemap's URL.
- The site has an unresolved manual action; Google doesn't read its sitemaps until that is fixed.
- The address is wrong and returns a 404.
- The server failed, sometimes only briefly.
- Google has little demand to crawl that sitemap.
Open the sitemap URL in a browser, then run a live test on it in URL Inspection: Page fetch should say it was successful. More in sitemap could not be read.
"Has errors": problems inside the file
| Error | Usual cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| URL not allowed | URLs above the sitemap's folder, or on another host, protocol or www variant | Keep URLs under the sitemap's location, on the same host |
| Path mismatch (Missing www, Includes www) | The URLs and the sitemap disagree about www | Use one version throughout |
| Invalid date | Dates not in W3C Datetime format | 2026-10-12, or 2026-10-12T09:30:00+00:00; a time needs a time zone |
| Invalid URL | Spaces, quotes or typos such as htp:// | Escape special characters and fix the address |
| Parsing error | Usually an unescaped & in a URL | Write it as & |
| Unsupported format, Incorrect namespace | Wrong header or namespace, or curly quotes | Use http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 and straight quotes |
| Missing XML tag or attribute | A required element is missing; the error gives the line | Add it |
| Nested sitemap indexes | An index lists another index | List only sitemaps in an index |
| Too many URLs, Sitemap file size error | Over 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed | Split the file and list the parts in a sitemap index |
| Compression error | A damaged gzip file | Compress it again and resubmit |
| URLs not followed | Redirect chains or relative URLs | List final, absolute URLs |
| Temporary error | A problem on Google's side | Wait; resubmit if it persists for hours |
After fixing the file
- Fix the generator, whether that's your CMS, a plugin or a build script, so the error doesn't return on the next update.
- Open the sitemap in a browser and check that the XML loads.
- Resubmit it in the Sitemaps report. If you can't submit it yourself, a
Sitemap:line in robots.txt also tells Google where it is. - Watch the status. "Discovered pages" counts the URLs Google parsed, not the ones it indexed.
Two quirks are worth knowing: deleting a sitemap from the report doesn't make Google forget it or its URLs, and the report shows at most 1,000 submitted sitemaps.
How AutoPSEO helps
AutoPSEO's Sitemaps page lists every sitemap Search Console holds for the property, with its type, URL counts, issues, and when it was last submitted and last read by Google, and lets you submit new ones. Sitemap Performance maps clicks and impressions onto each sitemap, and bulk inspection checks up to 500 of a sitemap's URLs per run against Google's index.
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