If Google search console is reporting a missing site map, shows “unable to fetch” or fails ownership verification, this could be due to a change in Cloudflare. Cloudflare has a feature called “Instruct AI bot traffic with robots.txt”, which will replace the robots.txt file, that we provide, with their own. This blocks known bad bots and AI crawlers. However, it prevents Google and other services from determining where the sitemap is located. This is because robots.txt file provided by Cloudflare does not include a link to the sitemap.
We have updated our robots.txt file to also block known bad bots and AI crawlers, and it will apply to all websites. You will also need to disable the “Instruct AI bot traffic with robots.txt” feature in Cloudflare (located in the Security -> Settings page), and this should fix the issue.