How to Check If Your Website
Is Indexed by Google (7 Methods)

You can't rank if you're not indexed. That sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how often it isn't. A single misplaced noindex tag, a robots.txt misconfiguration, or a canonical pointing at the wrong URL can silently exclude a page from Google's index — and it looks identical to a page that just doesn't rank. Here are seven ways to tell the difference.

The indexing pipeline

Before checking whether a page is indexed, it helps to understand why it might not be. Getting a page into Google's index requires surviving four stages:

A page can fail at discovery (Googlebot never finds the URL), at crawling (Googlebot is blocked by robots.txt or a crawl error), at processing (JavaScript render fails, canonical is wrong, noindex is found), or at the indexing decision itself (Google decides the content isn't worth indexing — thin, duplicate, or low quality). The seven methods below let you check each of these failure points.

Method 1: site: operator in Google Search

The fastest way to get a rough picture of your indexed pages is a site: search in Google:

# Check how many pages are indexed from your domain:
site:yourdomain.com

# Check if a specific page is indexed:
site:yourdomain.com/specific-page

# Check a section of your site:
site:yourdomain.com/blog/

If your domain appears in the results for the first search, you have indexed pages. If a specific page appears for the second search, that page is indexed. No results means Google hasn't indexed that URL — though the reason could be anything from “never crawled yet” to “actively excluded.”

Method 2: URL Inspection in Google Search Console

This is the most authoritative way to check a specific URL. URL Inspection tells you exactly what Google knows about the page: when it was last crawled, whether it's indexed, what canonical it resolved to, and any coverage issues detected.

To use it: open Google Search Console → any property → URL Inspection (top search bar or left sidebar). Paste any URL from your domain. The result will show one of several states:

• URL is on Google: Indexed. Clicking through shows crawl date, sitemap status, and enhancements detected.
• URL is not on Google — not indexed: The page has been crawled but excluded. The reason is shown: noindex, canonical mismatch, crawl anomaly, soft 404, duplicate content.
• URL is not on Google — not crawled: Googlebot hasn't fetched this URL recently. May be new, may be too low-priority, may be blocked by robots.txt at the crawl stage.
• URL has coverage issues: Something is wrong — the report will specify what.

URL Inspection also has a “Request Indexing” button. Using this for new or recently-updated pages typically results in a crawl within hours to a few days, significantly faster than waiting for the regular crawl schedule. Note: it doesn't guarantee indexing — it just schedules a crawl.

Method 3: Search Console Coverage report

For a full-site view: Google Search Console → Indexing → Pages. This report categorizes every URL Google has encountered on your site into one of four buckets:

The most actionable category is “Not indexed” with specific reasons. Click any reason to see which pages are affected. Common reasons and what they mean:

• Excluded by 'noindex' tag: The page has a noindex directive. This is intentional if it's a thank-you page, but a problem if it's an important content page.
• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical: Google found what it thinks is the canonical version at a different URL. Check whether your canonical tags are set correctly and whether there are redirect issues.
• Crawled, currently not indexed: Google crawled it but decided not to include it. Often: thin content, near-duplicate of another page, or content that doesn't meet quality thresholds.
• Page with redirect: The URL redirects to another. The redirect destination is what Google indexes.
• Soft 404: The page returns a 200 status code but contains content that indicates “not found” — like “Page not found” or empty search results.

Method 4: Check for noindex tags

A noindex directive can exist in two places: the HTML meta tag, or an HTTP response header.

<!-- Meta tag noindex (in HTML <head>): -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" />

# HTTP header noindex (check via curl):
curl -I https://yourdomain.com/page | grep -i x-robots

Many CMS platforms add noindex to certain page types by default — archives, tag pages, search results, author pages, pagination pages. In WordPress, this is controlled by your SEO plugin. In Next.js, it's set via export const metadata = { robots: { index: false } }.

SEOCheckPilot's full audit includes an indexability module that checks both the meta robots tag and the X-Robots-Tag response header, and shows you the current directives for any URL you audit.

Method 5: Check robots.txt

Your robots.txt file (at yourdomain.com/robots.txt) tells crawlers which paths they may or may not access. A Disallow: directive for a path prevents Googlebot from crawling URLs at that path — which means any noindex or canonical tags on those pages are never seen, and the pages won't be indexed.

# Typical robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /private/

# A problem: accidentally disallowing content you want indexed
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/  # This blocks ALL blog pages from crawling

# Another common mistake:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /  # This blocks ALL pages from crawling

Method 6: Canonical tag audit

A canonical tag tells Google which URL is the “official” version of a page. If your canonical tag points to a different URL (especially if it points to a URL that isn't indexed itself), Google will index the canonical destination, not the page you're looking at.

<!-- Correct: canonical points to this page's own URL -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://yourdomain.com/blog/this-article" />

<!-- Problem: canonical points to a different URL (maybe from copy/paste) -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://yourdomain.com/blog/different-article" />

<!-- Serious problem: canonical points to HTTP when the page is HTTPS -->
<link rel="canonical" href="http://yourdomain.com/blog/this-article" />

Common canonical issues:

• Canonical pointing to a redirect destination instead of the final URL
• Canonical using HTTP on an HTTPS page
• Canonical pointing to www. from a non-www. page or vice versa
• Canonical pointing to a page that itself has a different canonical (chained canonicals)
• CMS template generating incorrect canonical due to URL parameter issues

Method 7: Crawl with Googlebot user agent

Sometimes pages serve different content to Googlebot than to regular browsers — a technique called cloaking (which violates Google's guidelines) or simply a server misconfiguration. The Render Check tool compares the raw HTML response with the Googlebot user agent against the JavaScript-rendered DOM, showing any differences.

You can also test this yourself with curl:

# Fetch as Googlebot:
curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"   https://yourdomain.com/page -s | grep -i "noindex|canonical|robots"

# Fetch as regular browser for comparison:
curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36"   https://yourdomain.com/page -s | grep -i "noindex|canonical|robots"

If the two outputs differ in ways that affect SEO directives — different canonical, one has noindex and the other doesn't, different content — you have a rendering or cloaking issue to investigate.

How to speed up indexing for new pages

Frequently asked questions