How to Check if a Page Is Indexed by Google (4 Ways)

The reliable way to check if a page is indexed by Google is URL Inspection in Search Console: paste the full URL and read the verdict. "URL is on Google" means it is indexed. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool} For every page at once, open the Page indexing report. A site: search is faster but, by Google's own account, no guarantee. ^{[1]Google Search Central. site: search operator}

How do you check if a page is indexed by Google?

There are four methods, and they answer different questions. Pick by how many URLs you need to check and how much detail you need back.

The rest of this guide walks through each one, in the order most people try them, and ends with the step that matters more than any of them: an indexed page is not a ranking page.

The site: search, and why it misses indexed URLs

Type site:example.com/blog/your-page into Google. If the page appears, it is indexed. If it does not appear, you have learned very little, and this is the part Google's documentation is unusually direct about. ^{[1]Google Search Central. site: search operator}

The site: operator restricts results to a domain, URL or URL prefix. ^{[1]Google Search Central. site: search operator} It was designed for searchers, and Google lists the consequences for site owners: an indexed URL "can show up" for a related site: query, "however it's not guaranteed"; the operator "doesn't necessarily return all the URLs that are indexed under the prefix"; bigger sites "shouldn't expect to see all their URLs"; and a bare site: query with no other words does not rank the results, so beyond the shortest URL at the top they are "relatively random". ^{[1]Google Search Central. site: search operator}

Two practical details follow from that page. First, site:https://www.example.com and site:https://example.com/ are different queries with different results, so match the protocol and host exactly. ^{[1]Google Search Central. site: search operator} Second, Google's own instruction for a URL that does not show up is to open the URL Inspection tool, confirm the URL can be indexed, and submit it there. ^{[1]Google Search Central. site: search operator}

The thing people get wrong: the result count on a site: search is not the size of your index. Google says the operator does not necessarily return every indexed URL under a prefix, so the number can only undercount. ^{[1]Google Search Central. site: search operator} The complete figure lives in the Page indexing report.

Where site: still earns its place is on sites you do not own: a client's competitor, a page that links to you, a site you have no Search Console access to. For your own property, it is a ten-second hint, not an answer.

URL Inspection: read the verdict and the last crawl

URL Inspection reports what Google holds in its index for one URL, and can run a live test on top of that. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool} It is the method Google links from most other reports, and it is the only one that explains why a page is not indexed.

1. Inspect the URL

Open the property that contains the page and paste the fully qualified URL into the search bar at the top of any Search Console screen, or click the Inspect link next to a URL in most reports. The URL must be in the currently opened property. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool}

2. Read the verdict

The indexed view returns one of four statuses. "URL is on Google" means the page is indexed and can appear in Search. "URL is on Google, but has issues" means the same, with enhancement problems such as malformed structured data. "URL is not on Google" means it will not appear in results. "URL is an alternate version" covers AMP alternates. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool}

3. Open the Page indexing card

This is where the check becomes a diagnosis. The card shows the indexing status with a short reason, the sitemaps that list the URL, a referring page Google may have used to discover it, the last crawl date and time, which crawler was used, whether robots.txt allowed the crawl, whether the page fetch succeeded, whether indexing is allowed, and the user-declared and Google-selected canonical. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool}

Three of those fields deserve a second look:

• Last crawl. Google states that all information in the tool is derived from this last crawled version. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool} If you fixed something after that date, the tool has not seen it yet.
• Indexing allowed? If robots.txt blocks the crawl, this field always says Yes, because Google cannot read a noindex tag on a page it cannot fetch. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool} A blocked page can still end up indexed from links alone.
• Google-selected canonical. If it differs from the inspected URL, Google folded this page into another one. The help page notes the value can be a few hours behind the index. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool} How Google chooses and how to change its mind is covered in why Google chooses a different canonical.

4. Decide whether a live test is needed

The indexed view is not a live test; Google says the page "may have changed or become unavailable" since it last looked. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool} Click Test live URL to fetch the current page. The live test confirms whether Google can access and index the page now, but Google is explicit that a passing live test does not mean the page will be indexed, and that duplicate, canonical and "Crawled - currently not indexed" decisions are made at indexing time and are not tested live. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool}

When the verdict is "URL is not on Google" and the reason is "URL is unknown to Google" or a block you have since removed, the next step is one request, not ten. The procedure, the quota and the cases where a request changes nothing are in how to request indexing in Google Search Console. Note that inspections themselves have a daily limit per property, so the tool is for diagnosis, not for auditing a site. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool}

The Page indexing report: every indexed and not-indexed page

Open Indexing > Pages. The report shows the indexing status of all URLs that Google knows about in your property, as a chart and count of Indexed and Not indexed pages, plus a table of the reasons pages were not indexed. ^{[3]Google Search Console Help. Page indexing report} Google describes the two totals above the chart as complete and accurate from its perspective, allowing for small discrepancies. ^{[3]Google Search Console Help. Page indexing report} That makes this the one number to track; site: cannot match it.

Filter to the pages you actually submitted

The dropdown above the chart has four options: All known pages, All submitted pages, Unsubmitted pages only, and a specific sitemap URL. ^{[3]Google Search Console Help. Page indexing report} "Known" includes every URL Google found by any route, including parameter variants and tag archives you never meant to index. "Submitted" is the set you put in a sitemap, so its indexed count is the one that maps to your content plan. The Sitemaps report only tells you how many URLs were parsed from a sitemap, and says outright that discovery is no guarantee of crawling or indexing; its own advice is to filter the Page indexing report by sitemap to see how many were indexed. ^{[4]Google Search Console Help. Sitemaps report}

Read the reasons table

Rows are sorted by what Google thinks matters most. Each row has a Source value, Website or Google, and Google says you can generally fix only the Website ones. ^{[3]Google Search Console Help. Page indexing report} Click a row for a details page with up to 1,000 example URLs; the list is not guaranteed to contain every affected URL, and each example has an inspect icon that opens URL Inspection for that URL. ^{[3]Google Search Console Help. Page indexing report} The "View data about indexed pages" link under the chart does the same for indexed URLs: history plus up to 1,000 examples. ^{[3]Google Search Console Help. Page indexing report}

Not every row is a problem. Google's help page says plainly that non-indexed URLs can be fine, that you should not expect every URL to be indexed, only the canonical ones, and that a page reported as a duplicate or alternate is usually good news because the canonical was indexed instead. ^{[3]Google Search Console Help. Page indexing report} A row of Duplicate without user-selected canonical, for example, means Google merged near-identical URLs on its own; the question is whether it kept the one you wanted.

A worked example

The figures below are constructed to illustrate the pattern, not taken from a real property. Imagine an SEO blog with 1,150 articles in its sitemap.

Read the first row, not the second. The 1,210 not-indexed URLs under "All known pages" are tag archives, tracking-parameter variants and redirected slugs, and the reasons say Google handled them as intended. The 90 in the sitemap row are the real work: 55 articles Google crawled and chose not to index, 25 pairs it folded together, and 10 URLs that should come out of the sitemap. The site: search on this blog shows a few hundred results and none of this.

One more cross-check closes the loop. A page can be indexed and still earn zero impressions; the Page indexing report will never tell you that. Filter the Performance report to the URL and look at impressions and average position over the last three months. Indexed with no impressions is a relevance or competition problem, and the fix is on the page, not in the index.

Check many pages at once (sitemap + URL Inspection API)

For a few hundred URLs, the sitemap filter above is enough. For a specific list, the URL Inspection API returns the same fields as the tool: a verdict, the coverage state, the last crawl time, the Google-selected and user-declared canonical, and the robots.txt and noindex state. ^{[7]Google Search Console API. UrlInspectionResult} The verdict values map to the report's vocabulary: PASS is Valid, NEUTRAL is Excluded, FAIL is Error. ^{[7]Google Search Console API. UrlInspectionResult}

The quota is per site: 2,000 calls a day and 600 a minute. ^{[5]Google Search Console API. Usage Limits} The API reports only the version in Google's index; Google says you cannot test the indexability of a live URL through it. ^{[6]Google Search Console API. Method: index.inspect} Setup, a worked request and the rest of the quotas are in the Google Search Console API guide.

Indexed is not the same as ranking

Every method above stops at the same line. "URL is on Google" means the URL is eligible to appear in Search results; Google's help page adds that it is not guaranteed to be there. ^{[2]Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection tool} Whether it earns clicks for the queries you care about is a Performance report question.

The reverse case is worth a check too. When two of your indexed pages share a query, the index is fine and the ranking still suffers. Our keyword cannibalization checker reads your Search Console impressions and positions, finds the queries where two of your pages split the impressions, and shows which page to keep.

What to do in Search Console now

1. For one URL, inspect it. Read the verdict, then the last crawl date and the Google-selected canonical before you conclude anything.
2. For the whole site, open the Page indexing report, filter to your sitemap, and treat that Indexed count as the number to track.
3. Work the reasons table from the top, Website-sourced rows first, and ignore the duplicate and alternate rows unless Google kept the wrong URL.
4. For a list of URLs, use the URL Inspection API within its 2,000-a-day quota rather than inspecting by hand.
5. For any page that is indexed, move to the Performance report. If it has no impressions, indexing was never the problem.

If a traffic drop sent you here, indexing is one of fourteen checks in the Search Console traffic drop checklist, and rarely the first.