Request indexingon Google andactually get found

How to request indexing on Google, step by step

You request indexing on Google only inside Google Search Console, and only for URLs you manage yourself. Your site has to be verified there as a property, and you need to be an owner or a full user; with restricted access the button simply is not there.

The process takes less than a minute once you know where to look. Paste the full URL into the search bar at the top, and Search Console shows what Google currently knows about that address, with the “Request indexing” button underneath. After the click Google runs a quick check for obvious indexing errors. If the page passes, it joins the indexing queue. If the live test already marks it as not indexable, Search Console will not accept the request at all.

How long it takes after that, Google describes rather cautiously: crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. You can follow progress in the same URL Inspection view, and clicking again does not help.

Why you should submit a sitemap for many pages

When you submit a sitemap, you tell Google about many pages in one go. Google recommends it as soon as you are dealing with more than a handful of URLs, and it helps most on a brand new site or after a domain move, when Google does not know the structure yet. A sitemap is a file, usually XML, listing every URL you want indexed. Most shop and content management systems write it for you anyway.

There are three ways to hand it over: the Sitemaps report in Search Console, the Search Console API, or a single line in your robots.txt pointing to the file. Each sitemap is limited to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed, so larger sites split it up and submit a sitemap index file that points to the parts. None of this is a promise, though, because Google itself calls a sitemap merely a hint (there is no guarantee it is downloaded or used for crawling).

One old trick is gone. Site owners used to notify Google of a changed sitemap by calling a ping URL, but Google deprecated that endpoint in June 2023 because most of what came through it was spam, and it now returns a 404 error. Older plugins may still ping it. They do no harm, they just shout into the void.

Why your page is still not indexed after you requested it

If a page is still not indexed after a request, the Page indexing report in Search Console usually names the reason. The common cases fall into four groups, and only one of them is a mistake in the strict sense.

The first group is blocks someone set on purpose or by accident. A noindex sits either as a meta tag in the page head or as an X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP response header, and the second one is sneaky because it does not show up in the page source. It is often set at server or folder level, for a staging area for instance, and then quietly applies to every new page below it. There is also a contradiction people trip over: if robots.txt blocks a page, Google never gets to read the noindex, and the URL can still appear in results when other pages link to it.

The second group is duplicates. When Google considers a page a duplicate of another, it indexes only one version, the one it thinks is canonical, even against your canonical tag if need be. Google calls this working as intended rather than an error, which is little comfort when the wrong version wins.

The third group is about content, and this is where it gets uncomfortable. If the report lists a page as crawled but currently not indexed, Google has read it and decided against it for now. According to Google there is no need to resubmit it. It would hardly change anything anyway, since indexing depends on the content and its metadata, and Google names low quality content as one of the reasons pages do not make it. What helps is making the page better: its own substance, a clear structure, and links from other pages on your site so Google understands where it fits.

What indexing means for your visibility in AI search

For AI search on Google, the index is the ticket in. According to Google's documentation, a page can only appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode if it is indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. There are no further technical requirements. A page missing from the index therefore drops out of classic results and AI answers at the same time, and how those answers pick their sources is covered in our article on Google AI Overviews.

Other AI services fetch content their own way, and a request to Google does nothing there. ChatGPT, for instance, uses the OAI-SearchBot crawler for its search, and according to OpenAI sites that block it in robots.txt will not be shown in its search answers. Which AI crawlers exist and how to let the right ones in is explained in AI crawlers and robots.txt, and the wider route into ChatGPT answers in ChatGPT SEO.

For Bing and several other engines there is IndexNow, an open protocol that lets a site report new or changed URLs immediately. Participants include Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep, and a submission to one of them is shared with all. Google is not among them. Many shop systems and plugins support IndexNow already, and Bing Webmaster Tools shows whether your submissions arrive. Indexing is not guaranteed here either.

What makes an indexed page easier for AI systems to read is covered in our piece on structured data for AI search. And whether any of this turns into mentions only becomes clear once you measure your AI visibility, because a place in the index is the precondition, not the result.