By Roger Montti
Publication Date: 2026-02-23 11:02:00
Google’s John Mueller answered a question about why a Search Console was providing a sitemap fetch error even though server logs show that GoogleBot successfully fetched it.
The question was asked on Reddit. The person who started the discussion listed a comprehensive list of technical checks that they did to confirm that the sitemap returns a 200 response code, uses a valid XML structure, indexing is allowed and so on.
The sitemap is technically valid in every way but Google Search Console keeps displaying an error message about it.
The Redditor explained:
“I’m encountering very tricky issue with sitemap submission immediately resulted `Couldn’t fetch` status and `Sitemap could not be read` error in the detail view. But i have tried everything I can to ensure the sitemap is accessible and also in server logs, can confirm that GoogleBot traffic successfully retrieved sitemap with 200 success code and it is a validated sitemap with URL – loc and lastmod tags.
…The…