The Sitemaps report is the section of Google Search Console where you submit your XML sitemaps and see whether Google has fetched them, when it last read them and how many URLs it found inside. It sits under Indexing in the left-hand menu.
How the Sitemaps report works
You enter the sitemap’s address, such as sitemap_index.xml or wp-sitemap.xml on a WordPress site, and Google adds it to a queue. The report then lists each submitted sitemap with its type, the date you submitted it, the date Google last read it, a status and the number of discovered pages and videos. If you submit a sitemap index, Google reads the child sitemaps inside it and lists them too.
Google ignores the priority and change frequency fields many sitemap plugins add, so do not expect the report to reflect them. It does use the last modified date when that date is accurate, which is why the date matters more than any other optional field.
The status column has three main values:
- Success: Google fetched and parsed the file.
- Has errors: Google read the file but some of it could not be processed, for example invalid dates or URLs on a different domain.
- Couldn’t fetch: Google could not retrieve it. On a freshly submitted sitemap this often just means it has not been tried yet; if it persists, the file may be blocked, returning an error or behind a login.
Click a sitemap and choose to see page indexing, and Search Console filters the Page indexing report to only the URLs in that file. This is the most useful view in the report, because it tells you how many of the pages you consider important are actually indexed and why the rest are not.
Why it matters
An XML sitemap is your list of pages you want indexed. The Sitemaps report is Google’s receipt for that list. For a new UK business site with few links pointing to it, the sitemap can be one of the main ways Google discovers pages at all, so a sitemap stuck on Couldn’t fetch slows everything down.
The per-sitemap indexing view also gives you a quality check. If, say, you list 300 service and blog pages and only 120 are indexed, that gap is a better guide to what needs fixing than any overall traffic chart.
Common mistakes
- Listing URLs you do not want indexed. Redirects, noindexed pages, parameter URLs and staging addresses in a sitemap send Google mixed signals.
- Submitting the wrong address. In a URL-prefix property the sitemap must sit under that exact prefix, including https and www. A domain property is more forgiving.
- Treating discovered as indexed. Discovered pages only means Google found the URLs in the file, not that it indexed them.
- Inaccurate lastmod dates. Plugins that set every page’s last modified date to today teach Google to ignore the field.
- Resubmitting daily. It does not speed anything up. Google rereads sitemaps it already knows about on its own schedule.
How to act on it
Submit one sitemap index per property, and also reference it in your robots.txt file with a Sitemap line so other search engines find it. Check the report after any site launch, migration or plugin change, then open the page indexing view for each sitemap and work through the reasons pages are excluded.
If the gap between submitted and indexed pages is large and the reasons are unclear, that is the kind of problem my technical SEO service is designed to find and fix.