"Is my website indexed?" is a yes/no question with a surprisingly error-prone answer. One popular method is unreliable, and people draw wrong conclusions from it constantly. Here are the checks that actually work.
Method 1: The site: search (quick check)
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. This lists pages Google has indexed from your domain. Add a path — site:yourdomain.com/blog — to check a section, or a full URL to check a single page. If a page shows up, it is indexed. Fast and free, though the count Google shows is only an estimate.
Method 2: URL Inspection in Search Console (definitive)
This is the authoritative check. In Google Search Console, paste any URL into the inspection bar. It tells you explicitly: "URL is on Google" (indexed) or "URL is not on Google" (not indexed), plus why — discovered, crawled, blocked, or excluded. This is the only method that gives you Google's own per-URL verdict with the reason attached.
Method 3: The Pages report (whole-site view)
Search Console's Indexing → Pages report shows how many of your pages are indexed versus not, broken down by reason ("Discovered – currently not indexed", "Crawled – currently not indexed", "Excluded by noindex", and so on). This is the best view of your whole site's indexing health.
The method NOT to trust: the Sitemaps "indexed" count
The Sitemaps report shows a count of submitted and "indexed" URLs — and in our testing that indexed figure is unreliable. We have repeatedly seen it disagree with reality. Do not make decisions based on it. For real index status, use URL Inspection or a site: search — never the Sitemaps indexed field.
What to do if you are not indexed
- Brand-new page? Give it time and request indexing via URL Inspection.
- "Discovered – currently not indexed"? Google knows about it but has not crawled it — usually crawl budget or weak internal linking. Full explanation here.
- "Crawled – currently not indexed"? Google fetched it and passed — a content-quality signal.
- "Excluded by noindex"? You have a noindex tag. Remove it if the page should be indexed.
- "Blocked by robots.txt"? Fix your robots.txt.
Indexed is not the finish line
A page can be indexed and still get no traffic — because it ranks too low to be seen, or because it is indexed but not actively served. Being in the index is necessary but not sufficient. If your pages are indexed but invisible, the problem is ranking or serving, not indexing — and our website audit measures each of those stages separately so you know which one to fix.
