How to get indexed on Google, and what to expect

The short version

• •Submit a sitemap in Search Console. This is the mechanism for telling Google about URLs at any scale.
• •Link to the page from pages Google already crawls. The most underrated step, and usually the one that actually moves a stuck page.
• •Use URL Inspection → Request Indexing for individual important URLs. Once. There is a daily quota and asking twice does nothing.
• •Then wait. Google's documentation says crawling alone can take from a few days to a few weeks.
• •If it is still not indexed after that, the problem is the page or the site, not the submission. That is what the diagnostics further down are for.

What "getting indexed" actually involves

Indexing is not one action, it is five stages, and the language around it collapses them into a single verb. That is where most of the confusion comes from: people optimise the stage they can control and expect it to determine the stages they cannot.

Everything you can submit, request or ping affects the first row. Nothing you submit affects the last two. A submission tool moves a URL from "Google does not know this exists" to "Google knows this exists", and that is a real and useful thing when the page is genuinely new. It is not a vote, and it does not carry any weight into the indexing decision.

This is why "I submitted it and it still is not indexed" is such a common complaint. The submission worked exactly as designed. The page then failed a different test.

The methods that actually exist

1. An XML sitemap, submitted in Search Console

The standard mechanism, and the only one that scales. List your canonical URLs, reference the sitemap from robots.txt, and submit it once in Search Console; Google re-reads it on its own afterwards.

A sitemap is a set of hints, not instructions. Including a URL does not oblige Google to crawl or index it, and including URLs that are broken, redirected or blocked actively wastes the crawl budget you wanted spent elsewhere. Ours is a free check for exactly that: find dead URLs your sitemap still advertises.

2. Internal links from pages Google already crawls

The step most people skip while refreshing Search Console. Googlebot finds pages by following links, and a page with no internal links pointing at it is asking to be discovered from a sitemap alone, which is the weakest possible signal that it matters.

If a page shows as Discovered, currently not indexed, this is usually the lever. A link from your homepage, a hub page, or a genuinely related article does more than any amount of resubmission, because it changes Google's estimate of whether the page is worth crawling rather than repeating a request it already received.

3. URL Inspection, then Request Indexing

In Search Console, paste the URL into the inspection bar and choose Request Indexing. Use it for individual pages that matter: a new cornerstone article, a page you just fixed, a URL that changed.

Two limits Google states directly. There is a quota on submitting individual URLs. And in Google's own words, requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL "won't get it crawled any faster". Requesting once is the whole of the available benefit; the rest is habit.

4. The Indexing API, if and only if it applies to you

Google publishes an Indexing API, and it officially accepts two page types: JobPosting and BroadcastEvent. If you publish job listings or livestream events, use it. If you do not, using it for ordinary pages is outside the documented contract, which means nothing about its behaviour is promised and nothing about it is supported. There is a fuller comparison here.

What to expect, honestly

Google's documentation gives the useful anchor: crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks. Note that is crawling, not indexing. Indexing follows, and Google is explicit that requesting a crawl does not guarantee inclusion "instantly or even at all".

What that means in practice, roughly:

• •An established site that publishes regularly: often hours to a couple of days. Google has learned your publishing rhythm and crawls accordingly.
• •A newer site with some links: days to a couple of weeks is ordinary.
• •A brand-new domain with almost no links: several weeks is normal, and nothing is broken. There is no trick that shortcuts this, because the thing being established is whether the site is worth crawling at all.
• •Any page, at any time: may not be indexed. Google indexes a subset of what it crawls, and a page can be crawled, understood, and declined.

The last one is the part most guides omit, and it is the one worth internalising. Indexing is not an entitlement that follows correct technical setup. It is a judgement about whether the page adds something to an index that already contains a great deal.

What does not work

• •"Instant Google indexing" tools. There is no public endpoint that submits arbitrary URLs to Google. Tools claiming this are usually doing IndexNow, which reaches Bing and others and never Google, or nothing at all.
• •Resubmitting the same URL repeatedly. Google says outright that it does not speed anything up. It only spends your quota.
• •Submitting a page that is blocked. A noindex, a robots.txt rule or a canonical pointing elsewhere overrides any submission. The request succeeds and the page stays out.
• •Pinging services and mass "index submission" packages. These affect discovery at best, and discovery is rarely the bottleneck for a page that has already been submitted once.
• •Waiting longer. If a page has not been indexed in a month, more patience is not the answer. Something on the page or the site is the answer.

If it is still not indexed: work through these

At that point it is a diagnosis, not a submission problem. In rough order of how often each turns out to be the cause:

The fastest way to rule out the mechanical causes at once is the indexability checker: it reads the HTTP status, robots.txt, the robots meta tag, the X-Robots-Tag header and the canonical in one pass and names the specific rule responsible.

Where the other search engines fit

Google is around 90% of search worldwide, so it deserves the attention it gets. But the remaining share is not nothing, and it is markedly easier to reach: Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon all implement IndexNow, which is a single unauthenticated request that tells them a URL changed. No account, no quota, no waiting to be discovered.

Bing also matters more than its direct share suggests, because it supplies results to DuckDuckGo, Copilot and ChatGPT's web search. If you are already doing the Google work, the IndexNow half takes about ten minutes to set up once and then costs nothing per page. That is the part we do, and it is free.

Last reviewed 2026-08-23. Claims about Google's behaviour are from Google's crawling and indexing documentation. Market share is from StatCounter, which puts Google between 89% and 91% depending on the month.