Update
I found the correct sitemap endpoint and it’s behaving normally for Googlebot:
https://forum.pragmaticentrepreneurs.com/sitemap.xml
It’s a valid sitemap index and it references:
https://forum.pragmaticentrepreneurs.com/sitemap_recent.xmlhttps://forum.pragmaticentrepreneurs.com/sitemap_1.xml
What I tested
- Googlebot access:
sitemap.xml,sitemap_recent.xml, andsitemap_1.xmlall return HTTP/2 200 with a Googlebot user-agent, and the body is real XML (not an HTML challenge page). - Headers / content type:
sitemap.xml:Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8sitemap_recent.xml+sitemap_1.xml:Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8- Responses include
x-discourse-route: sitemap/*andx-discourse-crawler-view: true(served by Discourse in crawler mode).
- IPv4 + IPv6: both return 200 on
sitemap.xml. - Stability: I fetched each sitemap 20 times in a row with a Googlebot UA — no 403/429/5xx.
- Typical response times were ~0.17–0.28s for
sitemap.xml, ~0.19–0.60s forsitemap_recent.xml, and mostly ~0.45–0.99s forsitemap_1.xml(one slower response at ~2.9s, still 200).
- Typical response times were ~0.17–0.28s for
- robots.txt: includes
Sitemap: https://forum.pragmaticentrepreneurs.com/sitemap.xmland doesn’t block/sitemap*.xml.
Search Console status
In Google Search Console, the sitemap index processing shows as successful, but only
https://forum.pragmaticentrepreneurs.com/sitemap_recent.xml is currently listed/recognized under “Sitemaps read”.
sitemap_1.xml is still not listed there.
Where this leaves things
From the server side everything looks fine, so this feels like a Search Console-side lag or partial processing: Google is reading the index and at least one child sitemap, but hasn’t surfaced the second one yet in the UI.
