Sitemap showing “Couldn’t fetch” on Google Search console.

Hello,

Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.

The status message may indicate Google is yet to fetch your sitemap. Alternatively, it could mean Google cannot fetch your sitemap because of an error in the sitemap. However, since you cannot tell both apart, it is a good idea to ensure it does not result from an error in your sitemap.

For further troubleshooting steps, this KB may help in fixing this issue:
https://rankmath.com/kb/couldnt-fetch-error-google-search-console/

Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need my assistance with anything else.

Hello,

Thank you for getting back to us.

Can you please share the sitemap URL with us, this would help us investigate the issue properly. Also, have you tried adding the plain version of your sitemap to GSC instead? If not, please try adding /?sitemap=1 to GSC and let us know if it worked or not.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation. Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Hello,

We’ve checked your sitemap and we can see it is working properly and Googlebot can access it without any issues.

In this case, you can try to follow the steps below and see if that works for you:

1. Flush the Sitemap cache by following this video screencast:
https://i.rankmath.com/pipRDp

2. Exclude the Sitemap files of the Rank Math plugin in your caching plugin. The cache could be via a plugin or from the server. For plugins or Cloudflare, please follow this article:
https://rankmath.com/kb/exclude-sitemaps-from-caching/

Once done, clear your website cache and resubmit the /sitemap_index.xml in the Search Console.

Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.