I saw an interesting question about the location, directory, the XML sitemap is placed in. Does that matter to Google, and if so how? John Mueller from Google responded that it depends.

John said on Twitter it depends “on how they [the sitemap files] were discovered.” He said (a) If submitted via anonymous ping, they’re only valid there & lower levels and (b) If you submit them through your Search Console account, they can be valid for any verified site or part of a site.

Here are the tweets:

Let me show you the video embed at the start time, which was from 2017 and started at the 6:26 mark:

Here is the transcript:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Note: This story was pre-written and scheduled to be posted now, I am currently offline for a holiday.