What happens during indexing
After crawling, Google analyzes a page's text, tags, images and videos. It then groups pages with similar content into clusters and picks the most representative one as the canonical, which is the version normally shown in results. Finally it collects signals about that page, such as its language, the country it targets and its usability, and stores everything in the index.
Why a page is not indexed
The Page indexing report in Search Console gives the exact reason. The most common ones:
- A noindex tag, often left over from a staging site.
- The URL is blocked by robots.txt, so Google cannot read it.
- Duplicate: Google chose a different URL as canonical.
- Soft 404: the page returns 200 but looks empty or broken.
- "Discovered, currently not indexed": Google knows the URL but has not crawled it yet.
- "Crawled, currently not indexed": the page was read but judged not useful enough for now.
Checking whether a page is indexed
The URL Inspection tool in Search Console is the only reliable source: it shows whether the page is indexed, which canonical Google selected, the last crawl date and any blocking issue. The site: search operator only gives a rough estimate. For a whole site, compare the number of URLs submitted in sitemaps with the number actually indexed.
Getting a new page indexed faster
Link to it from a page Google crawls often, such as the homepage or a main navigation section, add it to your sitemap with an accurate lastmod date, and request indexing in the URL Inspection tool. Google notes that crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and that repeating the request does not speed it up. For Bing, the IndexNow protocol notifies the search engine within seconds.