I am having trouble redirecting to /admin/seo after form submission. The script insists to stay at https://www.example.com/admin/seo/submitIndexNow. My form is a simple button as follows:

My controller takes my sitemap.xml and preps it for submission to indexnow. Here is my controller:

data['admin_css']    .= '';
        $this->data['admin_js']     .= '';
        return view('/Admin/SEO/seo_index', $this->data );
    }

    public function submitIndexNow()
    {
        error_reporting(-1);
        ini_set('display_errors', '1');

        // Path to your sitemap
        $sitemapPath="sitemap.xml";
 
        // Load the sitemap
        $sitemap = simplexml_load_file($sitemapPath);
        if ($sitemap === false) {
            return redirect()->to('/admin/seo')
                ->with('warning', 'Failed to open sitemap.xml');
        }
        
        // Extract URLs from the sitemap
        $urlList = [];
        foreach ($sitemap->url as $url) {
            $urlList[] = (string) $url->loc; // Get the  content
        }
        
        // Your API key and key location
        // openssl rand -hex 16
        $apiKey = "[deletedkeyhere]";
        $host = site_url();
        $keyLocation = site_url($apiKey);
        
        // Prepare the payload
        $payload = [
            "host" => $host,
            "key" => $apiKey,
            "keyLocation" => $keyLocation,
            "urlList" => $urlList // List of URLs extracted from the sitemap
        ];
        
        // Convert payload to JSON
        $payloadJson = json_encode($payload, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);
        
        // Call submitIt() to send the payload
        $this->submitIt($payloadJson);
    }

    public function submitIt($payloadJson)
    {
        // API endpoint for IndexNow
        $endpoint = "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow";
    
        // Initialize cURL
        $ch = curl_init($endpoint);
    
        // Set cURL options
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, ['Content-Type: application/json']);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $payloadJson);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    
        // Execute the request
        $response = curl_exec($ch);
    
        // Get HTTP response code
        $httpCode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
       
        curl_close($ch);
        
        // Handle response
        if ($httpCode === 200) {
            return redirect()->to('/admin/seo')
                ->with('info', 'Success - sitemap.xml was submitted to IndexNow');
        } else {
            return redirect()->to('/admin/seo')
                ->with('warning', 'Failed to submit URLs. HTTP Code: ' . $httpCode)
                ->with('response', $response);
        }
        
    }

}

The submission fails which is fine. Curl has no errors, however, httpCode replies with an error (eg not 200) which is fine but I cannot get the script to redirect back to /admin/seo where I want to display the errors. I always end up at a blank screen at https://www.example.com/admin/seo/submitIndexNow. I know for a fact that the script handles the HTTP response correctly and get to the redirect portion of the script. In fact, it gets to the warning part. If I place something like echo 'here'.die(); just before the return direct, it works… I just can’t get the redirect to go back to /admin/seo. It insists on staying at https://www.example.com/admin/seo/submitIndexNow. Any help super appreciated.

These are my routes:

$routes->add('/admin/seo', 'Admin\SEO\SEO_Controller::SEO_index');
$routes->add('/admin/seo/submitIndexNow', 'Admin\SEO\SEO_Controller::submitIndexNow');