How to check if your website is indexed by Google

A page can be live, linked, well written and perfectly built, and still be absent from Google. Publishing and being indexed are two separate events, and the gap between them is where a lot of frustration sits.

Checking properly takes about two minutes.

The three stages, and where pages get stuck

Google does three distinct things with a page, in order.

1. Discovery. It learns the address exists, by following a link or reading your sitemap.
2. Crawling. It fetches the page.
3. Indexing. It decides the page is worth storing and makes it eligible to appear.

Each stage can fail on its own, and the fix is different at each one. A page nobody links to and no sitemap mentions never gets discovered. A page blocked by robots.txt gets discovered but not crawled. A page with a noindex tag gets crawled and deliberately not indexed.

Note the third one carefully: crawling and indexing are not the same permission. Blocking a page in robots.txt does not remove it from Google, because Google cannot read the page to see your noindex instruction. Pages blocked this way can linger in results with no description. If you want a page out of search, use noindex and leave it crawlable.

The right way to check

Google Search Console, URL Inspection

This is the authoritative answer and the only one that is. Open Search Console, paste a specific address into the inspection box at the top, and read the result.

It tells you whether the URL is on Google, when it was last crawled, whether crawling is allowed, whether indexing is allowed, and which address Google has selected as canonical. That last one catches a lot of people: if Google has chosen a different canonical than you expected, your page is being folded into another one.

For a site-wide view, open the Pages report. It lists every reason Google has excluded pages, with counts. Work down that list rather than inspecting pages one at a time.

Why the site: search misleads people

Searching site:yourdomain.com is the trick everyone knows, and it is a rough indicator at best. The result count is an estimate and is frequently wrong by a wide margin. It does not show every indexed page. And an empty result does not reliably mean you are not indexed.

Use it for a quick yes-or-no on whether Google has anything at all for your domain. Do not use it to count pages or to conclude that a specific page is missing.

Checking what is in the way

Search Console tells you whether a page is indexed. To see what on your side might be stopping it, run the page through the free indexability checker: it tests the page the way Googlebot meets it, no account or verification needed.

What to do about pages Google has skipped

"Discovered — currently not indexed"

Google knows the page exists and has chosen not to fetch it yet. This usually means Google is not convinced the site warrants the attention — common on new sites, and on sites with many low-value pages. Fixing it is not technical: reduce the number of near-identical pages, and get a few genuine links from sites Google already crawls.

"Crawled — currently not indexed"

Google fetched the page and decided not to store it. This is a quality judgement, and it is the hardest one to argue with. It is most common on thin pages and on pages that substantially duplicate another page on your site. The answer is to make the page worth indexing or to merge it into the page it duplicates.

"Alternate page with proper canonical tag"

Working as intended, usually. Google is following your canonical tag and indexing the other version. Only a problem if the canonical is pointing somewhere you did not intend.

Canonical tags explained →

"Excluded by noindex tag" or "Blocked by robots.txt"

Both are your instructions being obeyed. If the page should be in Google, these are quick fixes and they are the two most common causes of a site vanishing entirely.

Getting a new page indexed faster

You cannot force indexing, and anyone selling "instant indexing" is selling you something that is not theirs to sell. Four things genuinely help:

• Submit an XML sitemap and keep it current.
• Link to the new page from somewhere established on your own site — not just from the sitemap.
• Use Request Indexing in Search Console's URL Inspection for genuinely important pages. It is a queue, not a command, and it is rate-limited, so save it for pages that matter.
• Be patient with a new domain. Weeks is normal.

If nothing is being indexed at all rather than one page, the cause is nearly always one of the two site-wide blocks above. The free audit checks both, along with your sitemap and canonical tags, and tells you which applies.