Has anyone seen this happen in Google Search Console?

I launched a content site about 2.5 months ago. Current stats: • ~250 pages published • ~196 pages indexed by Google • Pages are receiving organic traffic from Google, Bing, Reddit, HN, and social media • Brand searches are starting to appear on page 1 The strange part: Google Search Console still shows my sitemap as: "Couldn't fetch" with 0 discovered pages. Yet the sitemap URL loads fine in a browser, robots.txt references it correctly, and Google has clearly discovered and indexed hundreds of pages. At the same time, I noticed indexed pages dropped from ~238 to ~196, while "Crawled – currently not indexed" increased. I'm trying to figure out whether: Search Console is simply showing stale sitemap data Google is finding URLs through internal links and ignoring the sitemap This is a normal quality-filtering phase for a young site Or it's an early warning sign that Google isn't happy with the content Would love to hear from anyone who has experienced the combination of: • Sitemap = "Couldn't fetch" • Hundreds of pages indexed anyway • Growing "Crawled – currently not indexed" counts What happened next? submitted by /u/kamscruz [link] [留言]