The Page indexing report in Google Search Console, formerly called Index Coverage, lists the URLs Google knows about on your property and splits them into indexed and not indexed. Each not-indexed URL carries a reason, such as Excluded by noindex tag, Page with redirect or Crawled - currently not indexed. Some reasons are expected and harmless. Others mean pages you want in search are missing, and they are the first place to look when a new section is not getting traffic.
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The reasons you will see most
Read each reason against what you intended. A redirected or noindexed URL being excluded is the system working. A pricing page in the same bucket is a problem.
- Crawled - currently not indexed: Google fetched the page and chose not to index it for now, often because it adds little beyond pages already indexed
- Discovered - currently not indexed: Google knows the URL but has not crawled it yet, which can point to weak internal linking or, on large sites, crawl capacity
- Duplicate without user-selected canonical: Google treats the page as a duplicate and you have not said which version is the main one
- Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user: Google ignored your canonical tag and picked another URL
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag: an expected exclusion when your canonical points elsewhere
- Excluded by noindex tag, Blocked by robots.txt, Page with redirect, Not found (404) and Soft 404
How to work through it
Start with the URLs you care about rather than the totals. Filter the report by the sitemap that lists your important pages, so you see what is missing from that set. Use the URL Inspection tool on a sample to see the crawl date, the canonical Google chose and how the page rendered.
For pages stuck as crawled or discovered but not indexed, the fixes are usually about value and links: make the page meaningfully different from similar ones, merge thin variants, and link to it from pages Google already crawls often. Requesting indexing can prompt a recrawl but does not change the decision if the page is still weak.
Example
Template pages that never made it in
A fictional scheduling tool, Slotwise, launches two hundred city pages for its booking software. The Page indexing report shows most of them as Crawled - currently not indexed. The pages differ only by city name.
Slotwise cuts the set to the cities where it has real customers and local detail to add, redirects the rest to a single page, and links the survivors from its customer stories. The remaining pages move into the indexed bucket over the following crawls.
Common mistakes
Panicking about the not-indexed total
Every site has many excluded URLs: redirects, parameters, alternates. The count matters less than whether important pages are in it.
Requesting indexing over and over
Repeated requests do not override Google's judgement of a page. Improve the page or its links instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not a technical error. Google could fetch the page but chose not to index it for now. Treat it as a quality or duplication signal for that page.
It is not real time. Changes show up after Google recrawls the affected URLs, which can take days or longer depending on the site.
No. Indexing only makes a page eligible to appear. Ranking depends on relevance and quality for each query.
Keep reading
- Indexing: Indexing is when a search engine processes a crawled page and stores it in its index so it can appear in search results.
- Google Search Console: Google’s free tool for site owners that shows which searches bring up a site, how often it is clicked, and whether Google can crawl and index its pages.
- URL Inspection tool: The URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console shows how Google sees one URL: index status, chosen canonical, rendered HTML and crawl details.
- Canonical URL: A canonical URL is the version of a page search engines treat as the main one when several URLs show the same or very similar content.
- AMP: AMP is a web framework for building fast-loading pages under strict rules on JavaScript and CSS. Google no longer requires it for the Top Stories carousel.
- Cache-Control: Cache-Control is an HTTP header that tells browsers and CDNs whether and how long to store a response. Good caching makes repeat loads and crawls faster.
- Canonicalization: Canonicalization is the process of choosing one preferred URL when several pages have duplicate or very similar content, so search engines know which version to show.
- Chrome UX Report: The Chrome UX Report is Google's public dataset of real-user performance from Chrome. It is the field data behind Core Web Vitals in Search Console.
