Search Console Page indexing report

What the report is for

The Page indexing report answers "how much of my site is in Google, and why isn't the rest?" It counts every URL Google knows about in a property and sorts them into Indexed and Not indexed, with a reason for each not-indexed group. Google describes the indexed plus not-indexed totals as "complete and accurate from Google's perspective."

It does not answer "is this page indexed?" for an arbitrary page. Google's help page says so directly: the report "isn't used to investigate the index status of specific pages", and points to the URL Inspection tool for that. For the single-page question see how to check if a URL is indexed.

Who needs it

Google's guidance is that sites under roughly 500 pages probably don't need the report, and can check key pages with site: searches. The site: accuracy page explains the caveats of that approach. Larger sites, migrations and sites with crawl problems get the most from it.

Reading the summary page

• Chart and totals: indexed and not-indexed counts over time. Google says a healthy site usually shows a gradually rising indexed count.
• Why pages aren't indexed: one row per reason, with a Source column showing whether the cause is the website or Google. Google notes owners can generally only fix issues sourced to the website.
• Improve page experience: issues that did not block indexing.
• View data about indexed pages: historical counts and an example list of indexed URLs.

A sitemap filter above the chart switches between all known pages, all submitted pages, unsubmitted pages and a single sitemap. Filtering to a sitemap of important URLs is the quickest way to see whether the pages you care about are indexed.

The 1,000-row limit

Each details page lists example URLs for one reason. Google states the list is limited to 1,000 rows and "isn't guaranteed to show all URLs in a given status, even when less than 1,000 items." That makes the report unsuitable as a complete per-URL inventory. Owners who need one either inspect URLs individually within the inspection limits, or run a bulk index check against their URL list.

Common not-indexed reasons

The report uses a fixed vocabulary. The groups most relevant to index checking are:

Google's documentation stresses that "Not indexed" is not automatically bad: duplicates, redirects and deliberately blocked pages should be excluded. The reasons are unpacked further in interpreting not-indexed results and, for duplicates, canonicalization and index checks. Block-type reasons are covered by noindex and robots checks.

Validating a fix

After fixing every instance of an issue, an owner can click Validate fix. Search Console checks a few pages immediately, then queues the remaining affected URLs for recrawl. Google says validation "typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer." Validation stops if Google finds a single remaining instance. Google also recrawls and updates counts without validation, so validating is optional.

Timing expectations

Two time facts from Google's help are useful when planning checks. New content "can take a few days" to be indexed, and a new page or site can take about a week before Google starts crawling and indexing it. Checking far earlier tends to produce not-indexed results that resolve on their own; the re-check frequency page turns this into a schedule.

Where it stops

The report only covers properties you own. It says nothing about backlinks on other domains, which is the main use case for public query checks and tools such as the IndexChex checker from this site's publisher; the backlink indexation guide covers that workflow. For definitions of the two "currently not indexed" states, see the glossary entry.