Google Search Console ‘Couldn’t fetch sitemap’

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

Rank Math is generating the sitemap as can be seen by viewing the page source of sitemap. Kindly see the screenshot I shared in the sensitive data section.

There must be a conflict with another plugin or the theme. You can use the Health Check plugin to determine which plugin or theme is causing this. Another scenario is that you have a static file with the same name as your sitemap file (sitemap_index.xml). You should FTP into your server and remove the file.

Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.

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Hello,

I have shared a screenshot of your sitemap’s page source which you can see in the Sensitive Data section on this ticket. If you are unable to find the screenshot, I’m also sharing it here: https://i.rankmath.com/hl16k7

The purpose of this screenshot is to show you that Rank Math is functioning properly and generating a dynamic XML sitemap. However, there’s either a plugin/theme conflict or your server has a static file by the name sitemap_index.xml. You can access your site via FTP and remove that static file and this should fix your issue.

We hope that answers your question. Let us know if you need further assistance, we are here to help.

Hello,

We hope this should fix your issue. However, if it doesn’t, then we are here to assist you.

Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you

We might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress & FTP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.

Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.

It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/

You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/

We really look forward to helping you.

Hello,

couldn’t fetch the Sitemap is a bug on Google’s end. Please read here
https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/3280971?hl=en

It’s happening with other SEO plugins as well.

The most prominent reason behind that seems to be the introduction of the Indexing API
https://rankmath.com/blog/google-indexing-api/

Google has plans to drop the use of Sitemaps and allow indexing API.

With that said, if your Sitemap is opening fine and online tools, such as the below one, shows no error, you should be fine
https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html

My colleague has already validated your sitemap in the above reply.

With that said, always submit only the index of the Sitemap in Google Search Console, which looks like this
https://domain.com/sitemap_index.xml

Hope that clears the confusion.