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Search Console: Sitemaps report

Sitemap "Has errors" in Search Console: what to fix

Google fetched the sitemap but found errors in it. Which errors stop URLs being read, which do not, and how to find them before resubmitting.

Google fetched the sitemap and parsed part of it, but found one or more errors. URLs it could parse are still queued for crawling. Open the sitemap in the report to see each error, fix the XML or the listed URLs, validate the file, and resubmit. The other entries keep working meanwhile.

What "Has errors" means

Google: "Has errors: The sitemap could be fetched, but has one or more errors. Any URLs that could be parsed without errors from the sitemap will be queued for crawling." The top of the report may phrase it as "Sitemap had X errors", and the details page as "Sitemap can be read, but has errors". Google's list of error types includes Invalid URL, Parsing error, Empty sitemap, Sitemap file size error ("larger than 50MB when uncompressed"), Too many URLs (over 50,000), and "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt".

Is it a problem?

Depends on the URL

It depends on the error. A parsing error can cut off everything after it; an invalid date on one entry affects that entry. Google still queues every URL it could parse, so this is rarely an emergency, but the errors are worth fixing because they are exactly what Google is telling you it could not use.

Causes, most likely first

  1. Unescaped characters such as a raw ampersand in a URL, which Google names as the usual cause of a parsing error.
  2. Relative URLs, spaces or malformed schemes, reported as Invalid URL.
  3. More than 50,000 URLs or more than 50MB uncompressed in one file, which needs splitting with a sitemap index.
  4. URLs in the sitemap that robots.txt blocks, usually a sitemap generator that does not read robots.txt.
  5. Invalid lastmod dates or tags from a plugin or hand-written generator.

How to confirm it

  1. Click the sitemap in the Sitemaps report to list each error with details.
  2. Run the sitemap validator on the file to see parse errors and size limits from the live file.
  3. Run the sitemap audit to find listed URLs that redirect, return errors, carry noindex or are blocked by robots.txt.

Sitemap validatorSitemap hygiene check

How to fix it

  1. Fix the XML errors at their source, usually the generator or plugin, not by hand-editing the output.
  2. Remove URLs from the sitemap that are blocked, redirected, noindexed or not 200. A sitemap should list the canonical URLs you want indexed.
  3. Split files over 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed and list them in a sitemap index.
  4. Validate the file again, then resubmit it in the Sitemaps report.

How long recovery takes

Google documents no timeline. It reads the sitemap again on its own schedule; resubmitting signals the change. Previously read information is kept: a later read "will not cause Google to "forget" the information from previous reads."

Would monitoring have caught it?

A sitemap that stops being fetchable, or whose URL count drops by more than half, is a warning on the next daily sitemap check, and the change history keeps the status and the count we saw. It reads the sitemap as our crawler receives it; it cannot see Google's crawl demand, a manual action, or what Search Console shows.

stillindexed reads each site's sitemap once every 24 hours on every plan, independently of Search Console.

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Sources

Every claim above about how Google behaves is from Google's own documentation, read on 2026-10-22. If Google has changed a page since, Google's page wins and we would like to know.