When Google Search Console Couldn’t Fetch My Sitemap, I Added an HTML Sitemap Fallback

Quick Summary: If GSC gives you a cryptic Could not fetch error on a technically valid XML sitemap, stop rewriting the XML too early. In this case, I controlled variables across Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Cloudflare Workers/OpenNext, and domain changes, which pointed to a production-domain or GSC-state anomaly. The practical SEO fallback was to add a crawlable HTML sitemap. I recently spent a lot of time debugging a sitemap problem that looked simple at first. Google Search Console kept saying:...