How to check if a page is indexed by Google

Step by step

1. Inspect the exact URL

In Search Console, paste the full URL into the search bar at the top, exactly as it appears in your address bar: https://example.com/guide/, with the right protocol, host and trailing slash. http://, www. and slash variants are separate URLs, and inspecting the wrong one gives a misleading answer.

2. Read the top-line result

"On Google" means eligible to appear. It does not mean the page ranks for any particular query.

3. Read the Page indexing details

Expand Page indexing. The useful lines:

• Discovery: sitemaps and referring pages that led Google to the URL.
• Last crawl and Crawled as: when and with which crawler.
• Crawl allowed? No means robots.txt blocks it.
• Page fetch: whether Google got the page or an error.
• Indexing allowed? No means a noindex directive.
• User-declared canonical and Google-selected canonical: if these differ, Google indexed a different URL as the main version.

4. Run a live test

The inspection result is Google's last stored crawl, which may be weeks old. Click Test live URL to fetch the page now. Then open View tested page to see the rendered HTML and a screenshot. If your fix is live but the stored result is old, the live test confirms it before Google recrawls.

5. Use the site: search as a quick check only

Searching site:example.com/guide/ in Google often shows the page if it is indexed. But site: results are incomplete and can lag, and a missing result does not prove the page is not indexed. For a batch of URLs, the Pages report is more dependable.

6. Check indexing across the whole site

Open Indexing → Pages. The chart shows indexed and not indexed counts, and Why pages aren't indexed groups the rest by reason. To check a specific set of pages, such as your sitemap, use the filter at the top of the report and choose All submitted pages or a single sitemap. Each reason links to a guide in this series.

If the page is not indexed

Match the reason to the fix:

• "Discovered - currently not indexed": not crawled yet
• "Crawled - currently not indexed": crawled, not chosen
• "Excluded by 'noindex' tag": a noindex is set
• "Blocked by robots.txt": a crawl rule blocks it
• "Duplicate without user-selected canonical": Google picked another URL
• "URL is unknown to Google": no links or sitemap entry found it yet

After a fix, click Request indexing in the same tool. See requesting indexing for how the quota works.

Checking without Search Console access

If you cannot get Search Console access, check the page's source for noindex and its canonical, confirm robots.txt allows it, and try a site: search. Those three catch most self-inflicted problems. They cannot tell you about Google's own indexing decisions; only Search Console shows those.