Sitemap URLs blocked by robots.txtWhat it checks and how to fix it

What it checks

Takes the URLs listed in the XML sitemap and tests each one on the site's own host against the robots.txt rules that apply to Googlebot. It warns when any sitemap URL is disallowed, passes when none is (or when there is no robots.txt), and is skipped when there is no sitemap.

Why it matters

Listing a URL in the sitemap says "please index this", while disallowing it in robots.txt says "do not crawl this". Google cannot read the blocked content, so the page either drops out or shows up as a bare URL with no description, reported in Search Console as "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt".

How to fix it

Decide for each flagged URL whether it should be indexed.

If it should, remove or narrow the Disallow rule that matches it:

# before: blocks every URL under /products, including the ones in the sitemap
User-agent: *
Disallow: /products

# after: blocks only the internal search results
User-agent: *
Disallow: /products/search

If it should not, remove it from the sitemap instead. To keep a crawlable page out of the index, use noindex rather than robots.txt, because a crawler that may not fetch the page never sees its noindex:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Test individual URLs with the robots.txt report in Google Search Console after deploying the change.