How to fix “Couldn’t fetch sitemap” error in Google Search Console

Have you been trying to add your sitemaps to Google Search Console and Google says “Couldn’t fetch”? You’re not alone!

The first step is to make sure that your sitemap can be fetched, which can be done by entering your sitemap in the URL Inspection tab and Testing Live URL. Just make sure you see “Successful” under Page fetch.

A Google Search Console interface showing a pages availability under Excluded by noindex tag. The URL status is Successful, crawled by Googlebot smartphone on July 1, 2020. No noindex tag is detected in the X-Robots-Tag header.

Now that you’ve confirmed your sitemap can actually be fetched, let’s change that status from the infuriating “Couldn’t fetch” to the eye pleasing green, “Success” message.

All you need to do is add a new sitemap and put two forward slashes after the domain, and another trailing forward slash after the .xml. Then just submit your sitemap and enjoy the long awaited successful sitemap submission!