A few things to isolate before treating this as a general sitemap failure:
- Open the child sitemap directly:
post_tag-sitemap.xml
- Check whether the tag taxonomy actually has indexable terms:
- tags exist
- tags are attached to published posts
- the tag archive is not set to noindex
- the individual tag terms are not set to noindex
If there are no indexable tag terms, the post_tag sitemap can fail or appear missing even when “Include in Sitemap” is enabled.
- Flush the sitemap/rewrite state:
- Rank Math > Sitemap Settings: turn sitemap off, save, turn it on, save
- Settings > Permalinks: save once without changes
- clear page cache/CDN/object cache
- Exclude sitemap URLs from caching if you use a cache/CDN layer:
sitemap_index.xml
*-sitemap.xml
If only the post_tag sitemap fails while other child sitemaps work, I would focus on taxonomy/indexability/caching first rather than the main sitemap index.
fixed, defaul settings is noindex
Thank You!