What are you checking? Pick one — get the right method:
The four methods at a glance
site: search
Fast spot check for any site. Google documents site: as a results filter, not an index inventory — counts fluctuate, misses happen.
Not proofURL Inspection
Google's authoritative per-URL verdict — but only for verified properties, one URL at a time, with a daily quota.
Source of truth (own site)Page Indexing report
Property-wide stats and non-indexed buckets. Updates with a lag; example lists are samples, not exports.
Trends (own site)Bulk checker
Thousands of URLs per task, any site, multi-method verification, per-URL report file. The only approach that scales.
Audits & listsThe 5-step verification protocol (single URL)
- Search the exact URL. Paste the full address into Google.
- Quoted search. Take a unique sentence from the page and search it in quotes — the most reliable manual signal.
- site: check.
site:domain.com/path— treat an empty result as a flag, not a verdict. - URL Inspection. On your own site, read the crawl date and the Google-selected canonical, not just the status.
- Cross-check disagreements. Quoted search + inspection details outrank site: counts.
Two minutes per URL. For 500 URLs — see below.
Why pages (and backlinks) stay out of the index
Common, fixable reasons: noindex left on the page or set by the platform, robots.txt blocks, canonicals pointing elsewhere, soft-404 signals, thin or orphaned pages with no internal links, and — for backlinks — placements on pages Google has no reason to crawl. A backlink on a non-indexed page passes nothing, which is why link audits start with an index check (full workflow: backlink indexation guide; triage for "Crawled – currently not indexed": fix guide).
Quick FAQ
Does "Indexed" in Search Console mean the page ranks?
No — indexing makes a page eligible to rank, nothing more. But a non-indexed page cannot rank at all.
Can I check pages I don't own?
Yes: site: search and bulk checkers work for any site. Search Console does not.
How often should I re-check?
After every deploy or link batch, then again at day 14 and day 28 — indexing is a state pages can drop out of, not a one-time event.
Check your list in minutes
Upload a .txt of URLs — get a per-URL indexed / not-indexed report. Works for any site.
Run a free bulk index check →First 50 checks free · SpeedyIndex Google Index Checker