The URL Inspection tool: how to check if a page is indexed

Updated 2026-08-07

What each field in URL Inspection means, the difference between the indexed version and a live test, and what requesting indexing does and does not do.

URL Inspection answers one question exhaustively: what does Google know about this specific URL? It is the fastest diagnostic in Search Console and the most under-used.

Paste any URL from the property into the search bar at the top of Search Console. You get the state of Google's last crawl — not a fresh check.

Reading the result

• URL is on Google. Indexed and eligible to appear. Eligible is not the same as ranking.
• URL is on Google, but has issues. Indexed, with a structured-data or enhancement problem. Usually non-urgent.
• URL is not on Google. Not indexed. The reason is stated underneath, and that reason is the actual information.

The fields that matter

Discovery. Which sitemaps list the URL, and the referring page Google found it through. A page with no referring page is effectively orphaned — it is in your sitemap and linked from nowhere, which reads as a page you do not value.

Crawl. Last crawl date, whether crawl was allowed, whether the fetch succeeded, and whether indexing was allowed. A successful fetch with indexing disallowed means a noindex tag or header you probably did not intend.

Indexing — and this is the important one. Two canonical lines:

• User-declared canonical — what your page's rel=canonical claims.
• Google-selected canonical — what Google actually chose.

When these disagree, you have found your problem. Google has decided a different URL is the real version and is indexing that one instead, which is why your page appears to be missing. It is the single most common explanation for "my page just is not in Google".

Indexed version vs live test

The default view is what Google has stored, possibly weeks old. Test live URL fetches the page right now.

Run both and compare. If the live test passes and the indexed version shows a problem, you already fixed it and are waiting for a recrawl. If the live test fails, the problem is live. The live test also has a screenshot and rendered HTML view, which is how you catch JavaScript that renders for you and not for Googlebot.

Request Indexing

Sitting under the result, and widely misunderstood.

• It adds the URL to a crawl queue. That is all. It is a nudge, not a command.
• It does not make Google index the page. If the page was rejected on quality or duplication grounds, it will be rejected again.
• The daily quota is small — roughly a dozen per property. It is designed for a handful of important pages, not a site rollout. Use a sitemap for volume.
• Requesting repeatedly does nothing. The queue position does not improve.

Use it after a fix, not instead of one. Request indexing once you have changed something material — removed a stray noindex, corrected a canonical, substantially improved a thin page. Requesting it on an unchanged page that Google already declined is time spent doing nothing.

When to reach for it

• A page you expected to rank produces no impressions at all.
• A page lost its traffic suddenly — check the Google-selected canonical first.
• You want to confirm a noindex or robots.txt change actually took effect.
• You suspect Googlebot sees a different page than you do.

One limitation: it only works for URLs inside the property. For anything else, verify that property first.