Google: sitemap 'couldn't fetch' errors can mean low crawl demand

John Mueller and Martin Splitt of Google’s Search Relations team said on the Oct. 1 episode of the “Search Off the Record” podcast that a sitemap’s “couldn’t fetch” status in Search Console doesn’t always signal a technical problem — it can reflect host load throttling or low crawl demand tied to a site’s perceived quality, per PPC Land. Mueller said RSS feeds can double as short-form sitemaps, typically listing 10-20 dated entries, but that Google’s search systems don’t process llms.txt files as sitemaps at all: “I would not treat that as a priority.”