Fixing Google Search Console Sitemap Fetch Error

Google Search Console kept showing “Couldn’t fetch” for my sitemap. The config looked fine, so what was going on?

The problem

I had @astrojs/sitemap configured in my Astro blog, and robots.txt pointed to the right place:

Sitemap: https://restato.github.io/sitemap-index.xml

But Search Console just wouldn’t fetch it.

Root cause

Ran npm run build locally and immediately got:

[vite]: Rollup failed to resolve import "@imgly/background-removal"

Build failure = no sitemap generated = nothing for GitHub Actions to deploy. Google was trying to fetch a file that didn’t exist.

The fix

Added the problematic module to astro.config.mjs:

vite: {
  build: {
    rollupOptions: {
      external: [
        '@imgly/background-removal',  // this was missing
        'onnxruntime-web',
        'onnxruntime-web/webgpu',
      ],
    },
  },
},

Also added lastmod to the sitemap for better crawl prioritization:

sitemap({
  serialize(item) {
    item.lastmod = new Date().toISOString();
    return item;
  },
}),

Lesson learned

When Search Console can’t fetch your sitemap, check if your build actually succeeds first. I was staring at config files when the real issue was a failed build.