Checking whether a site is indexed takes a minute if a rough answer will do and about an hour if you need an exact one. The site: operator is enough for a quick look. The exact answer comes from the webmaster consoles, Yandex Webmaster and Google Search Console, which show which pages are indexed, which are excluded and why. Below is what to look at in each engine, how to read the gap between a sitemap and the index, and what to do when new pages stay out of search for weeks.
What "indexed" actually means
A page reaches search in three steps. The crawler learns that the URL exists, from a sitemap, a link or a notification. It then crawls the page, which means downloading it. Finally the search engine decides whether to add the page to its index. Any of the three steps can fail, and the main reason to check indexing is to find out which one did.
An indexed page is not necessarily shown in results. Google's help page for the URL Inspection tool says that the status "URL is on Google" means the URL is eligible to appear in search results but is not guaranteed to be there (support.google.com, checked 14 October 2026). An indexed page can fail to show for any query at all. That is a ranking question rather than an indexing one.
Full indexing is not the goal either. Google's help for the page indexing report advises against expecting every URL on a site to be indexed and says to make sure the key pages are. Filter pages, sort orders and internal search results staying out of the index is normal.
A quick check with site:, and where it stops being useful
A search for site:example.com in Yandex or Google lists pages from the site that are in the index. To check a single URL in Google, search site:example.com/blog/article/; in Yandex the url: operator with the full address works better. If the page comes up, it is definitely indexed. This is the fastest way to check a fresh article or to confirm the site is in search at all.
The "about N results" figure cannot be trusted. Google's documentation for the site: operator (checked 14 October 2026) says the list of URLs it returns is not always exhaustive, that bigger sites should not expect to see all their URLs, and that even an indexed URL is not guaranteed to appear. The same applies to Yandex: the result count is an estimate and shifts from one query to the next.
So site: has two legitimate uses: checking one URL, and spotting a gross failure. If site: finds five pages on a site that has five hundred, something is wrong, and the webmaster consoles are where to dig. Tracking indexing month to month by that number is pointless.
Yandex Webmaster: the "Pages in search" report
For Yandex the main tool lives in Webmaster under Indexing → Pages in search. According to Yandex's help (checked 14 October 2026), the report has three views:
- "Recent changes": pages that entered or left search over the last three months, with the date and the reason for removal;
- "All pages": pages that take part in search, with the date of the crawler's last visit and the page title;
- "Excluded pages": pages that are not in search, with a status that gives the reason for exclusion.
Each list shows up to 50,000 records, can be filtered by URL and can be exported as XLS or CSV. On a large site the export is easier to work with than the interface, because a spreadsheet shows at once which sections drop out more than others.
The exclusion statuses carry the most information. Duplicates, redirects, 404s and robots.txt blocks are usually expected and say something about the site's structure. Low-value and low-demand pages need closer attention. Yandex's help (checked 14 October 2026) separates them like this: a low-value page is a duplicate or a page with no content visible to the crawler, while a low-demand page has no errors and does have content, but there are no users and no queries in search that it could answer. The same page says the algorithm rechecks pages regularly, almost daily, and that a page can return to search after it is updated.
If many excluded pages are marked low-demand, sending them for recrawl will achieve nothing, because there is no demand for them. The fix lies in the site's structure and keyword targeting. Which queries deserve a page of their own is covered in the article on building a semantic core.
For a single URL, Webmaster has a "Check URL status" tool that shows whether Yandex knows the page, when it last crawled it and whether it is in search. "Recrawl pages" lets you ask the crawler to visit specific URLs, which is useful after an important page has been fixed.
Google Search Console: the Page indexing report
In Search Console the equivalent is the Page indexing report. It splits the URLs Google knows about into indexed and not indexed, and gives a reason for each of the latter. Two of those reasons get confused more than any others.
"Discovered – currently not indexed" means Google knows the URL but has not crawled it yet. The help page explains that Google wanted to crawl it, but expected that doing so would overload the site, so the crawl was rescheduled. If there are many such pages and the number is growing, look at server response times and at how many junk URLs the site exposes to the crawler.
With "Crawled – currently not indexed", Google downloaded the page and decided not to add it for now. According to the help page it may be indexed later, and there is no need to resubmit it. In practice this status most often points to quality: a thin page, a near-duplicate of its neighbour, a template with no text of its own. It is a close relative of Yandex's low-demand pages.
Above the chart there is a filter: all known pages, all submitted pages, unsubmitted pages only, or a specific sitemap. "All submitted pages" answers the main question: how many of the pages you yourself consider important has Google indexed. Once the cause is fixed you can click "Validate fix"; Google's help says validation typically takes up to about two weeks.
Inspecting a single URL in Google
The URL Inspection tool in Search Console shows everything about one address at once: whether it is indexed, when it was crawled, which canonical Google chose and whether that matches yours. A canonical mismatch is a common reason for a page to "disappear" without any visible error: Google treats it as a duplicate of another page and shows that one instead.
Keep the two modes apart. The main result shows the most recently indexed version of the page, not the live one. The live test fetches the page now, but as Google puts it, no test can guarantee that a page will be indexed: the live test only confirms that the page can be crawled and parsed.
The "Request indexing" button has a daily limit per property, and Google's help does not state the number. For bulk checks there is the URL Inspection API. Google's documentation (checked 14 October 2026) gives its quota as 2,000 queries per day and 600 per minute per site. That is enough to run every important page of a small site through it once a week and keep the statuses in a spreadsheet.
Why the sitemap says "0 indexed"
The most common false alarm looks like this: the sitemap is accepted with no errors, it lists dozens of URLs, and the indexed column shows zero. We have seen it on our own site. On 14 October 2026 the Search Console API reported 48 submitted URLs and 0 indexed for the gbseo.ru sitemap. On the same day, inspecting one of those URLs, the Semrush beginner's guide, returned "Submitted and indexed".
There are two reasons for this. The first is technical: in the Search Console API, the field holding the number of indexed URLs from a sitemap is marked "Deprecated; do not use". Scripts, dashboards and third-party tools that still read it faithfully report zero. The second is delay: report data is not updated in real time, and new pages reach the report later than they reach the index itself.
The right number is in the Page indexing report filtered by the sitemap in question, and for individual pages in URL Inspection. If those show zero indexed as well, then the problem is real. On its own, a sitemap only says which URLs you offered the search engine, not which ones it accepted.
Yandex has a similar lag with sitemap processing. A newly submitted sitemap does not appear in Webmaster straight away, and an empty list in the first days does not mean the submission failed.
How long to wait, and when to worry
Google's help says that new content can take a few days to be indexed. Yandex's help page on adding a site to search says that once the crawler has visited a site, its pages can appear in search within two weeks (checked October 15, 2026). In practice a new page on a site the crawler visits regularly usually reaches the index within one to two weeks. On a new domain the crawler rarely visits, it takes longer.
These are the cases worth worrying about:
- the number of indexed pages is falling even though there are no new exclusions with obvious causes such as redirects or deleted pages;
- important pages have sat in "Discovered – currently not indexed" for a month or more, or do not appear in the reports at all;
- Yandex and Google disagree: one engine indexes a section and the other does not.
The last case nearly always points to something specific to one engine: different robots.txt rules for different crawlers, regional settings, a penalty. Other differences between the two engines are collected in the article on Yandex and Google. If the drop affects the whole site, start with a technical audit: status codes, canonicals and robots.txt come before anything else.
Speeding up indexing: IndexNow, recrawl requests, links
IndexNow is a protocol through which a site tells search engines about new and changed URLs itself. According to indexnow.org (checked 14 October 2026), it is supported by Yandex, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep and Amazon. A single POST request can carry up to 10,000 URLs, and a submission to one engine is shared with all the other participants. Google is not on the list, so for Google IndexNow does nothing. For a Yandex-focused project it is the cheapest way to cut the delay: a script sends the notification on every publish.
Manual recrawl in Webmaster and "Request indexing" in Search Console suit a handful of important pages, such as a fixed category or a new landing page for an ad campaign. Daily limits rule them out for bulk use, and for hundreds of URLs the sitemap and IndexNow work better.
Internal links help as well. A page with no links pointing to it from the rest of the site is crawled less often and looks less important to the engine. Put a new article in the list on the homepage or its section straight away, and link to it from two or three related pieces.
Finally, the modification date (lastmod) in the sitemap should change only when the page does. If every build stamps today's date on every URL, the engine stops trusting the field, and real updates get lost among the fake ones.
A monthly check, step by step
- Compare the number of pages indexed in Yandex and in Google with the number that should be there.
- Open excluded pages in Webmaster and non-indexed pages in Search Console, and sort the reasons by number of pages affected.
- Look separately at low-value and low-demand pages in Yandex and at "Crawled – currently not indexed" in Google: these are usually about page quality.
- Run the ten most important pages through URL inspection: status, crawl date, canonical.
- Confirm the sitemap is served without errors and lists only URLs that return 200.
- Record the numbers in a spreadsheet so that next month you compare against them instead of against memory.
The check takes about an hour and catches most problems before they show up in traffic. If indexing figures go into a client report, show them alongside the trend, as described in the article on the monthly SEO report.
FAQ
How do I quickly check whether a page is indexed?
Search for its URL with the site: operator in Google or url: in Yandex. If the page comes up, it is indexed. If not, check it in Webmaster and in Search Console, because the operator sometimes misses pages that are indexed.
Why does Yandex index more pages than Google, or the other way round?
The engines decide differently what counts as a duplicate and what is not useful enough. A small gap is normal. If one engine holds half as many pages as the other, compare the exclusion reasons in both consoles.
Do I need to submit every new page for indexing by hand?
No. A sitemap with an honest lastmod, internal links and, for Yandex, IndexNow are enough. Keep manual requests for pages that need to be in search urgently.
Does IndexNow help with Google?
No. Going by indexnow.org, Google does not take part in the protocol, so for Google you rely on the sitemap, links and "Request indexing" in Search Console.
The page is indexed but does not appear in results. What does that mean?
That is a ranking question. The page does not reach the visible part of the results for any query: it may have no matching demand, or competitors may be stronger. Check which queries it was written for and whether they have any search volume.