Sitemap submitted but pages are not indexed

The sitemap is valid, yet the pages stay out of the index: they are noindex, they canonicalise elsewhere, they are orphaned (no internal links), or the sitemap has no lastmod so the crawler has no reason to come back.

How to confirm it

Run this against your own domain:

curl -sS https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -c "<lastmod>"

How to fix it

Remove noindex pages and redirects from the sitemap, link every new page from an existing one, add per-URL lastmod with the real update date, then request indexing for the few pages that matter most instead of all of them.

Where it fits

This is a symptom of a failed check — here it points at A3. The failure it belongs to is only one of fifteen; the full list is in the standard, and the fix order that avoids redoing work is in the repair guide.