Google admits the "couldn't fetch" sitemap message can be misleading and doesn't communicate what the real issues are.

Google’s Martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed the reasons why Search Console may display a “couldn’t fetch” error even though a website displays a valid XML sitemap. While Mueller acknowledged there sometimes may be a technical reason for that happening he also said that the actual reason is often a quality issue.

Splitt acknowledged that many people who receive the “couldn’t fetch” error have valid XML sitemaps that are properly linked from robots.txt and there are no technical reasons for why Google would be unable to fetch the sitemap. The takeaway here is that workers at Google are aware of the problem and the user frustration (more about this later).

“Why does Search Console sometimes show “couldn’t fetch”, even though the sitemap XML is valid?

Because you can validate that. That’s the nice thing about such a structured format. So it’s valid, it’s publicly accessible, and it’s linked from the robots.txt. And yet Search Console says can’t fetch sometimes.”

Google’s John Mueller shared that they often see questions about the can’t fetch error message in forums and that there are two reasons for this error message.

The first reason is that sometimes Google really cannot access the sitemap because of server host load issues, which means that the server has too many incoming requests for pages and is unable to serve the requested resource. But it can also mean that the server can’t handle the crawling load.

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