How do I check if a page is indexed?

Open Search Console for the property, paste the full URL into the inspection field, and read the verdict at the top.

"URL is on Google" means it is indexed and eligible to appear. "URL is not on Google" means it is not, and the reason is stated underneath.

The detail that matters most is the Google-selected canonical. When it differs from the URL you inspected, that page is indexed under another address, which is a different situation from not being indexed at all.

The report also gives the last crawl date. A page crawled months ago with content published last week is a discovery problem rather than an indexing decision.

This tool requires verified ownership of the property, so it only answers for sites you control.

`site:example.com/some-page` in Google returns the page if it is indexed, most of the time. The qualifier matters: the operator runs against a different serving path and is known to omit results that the index genuinely contains.

It also gives no reason when nothing comes back. An absent result could mean not indexed, not yet crawled, canonicalised elsewhere, or simply not returned for that query shape.

Its one real advantage is that it needs no access to the property, which makes it the only option for a site you do not own.

Treat a hit as reliable evidence the page is indexed, and a miss as a reason to look properly rather than a conclusion.

The Page indexing report in Search Console groups every known URL by outcome: indexed, excluded by noindex, blocked by robots.txt, crawled but not indexed, discovered but not crawled, duplicate without a canonical, and so on.

This is where a pattern becomes visible. One page missing is an anecdote; four hundred pages in the same bucket names the cause.

The counts lag reality by days, so a fix shipped this morning will not show there this afternoon.

Each group can be expanded to a sample of URLs, and any of them can be sent straight to URL Inspection.

Indexed does not mean ranking. A page can be in the index and appear for no query anyone actually types.

Indexed does not mean indexed as you intended: a page indexed under a parameterised variant of its URL is indexed, and the address people see is the wrong one.

Not indexed is frequently a decision rather than a fault. Google's documentation is explicit that it does not index every page it crawls, and thin or duplicate pages are the usual ones it declines.

None of these tools is retroactive. They report the current state, not what happened last month.

Before concluding anything from Search Console, confirm the page does not exclude itself. Fetch it and look for a robots meta tag or an `X-Robots-Tag` header carrying `noindex`.

`curl -sI https://example.com/page | grep -i x-robots` and `curl -s https://example.com/page | grep -i 'name="robots"'` cover both places the directive can live.

Confirm the URL returns 200 rather than a redirect or a soft 404 under a 200 status.

Confirm the canonical tag on the page points at the page itself, unless it deliberately points elsewhere.

Half of the reports that begin as an indexing mystery end here, on a directive nobody knew was there.

A crawl answers the question at the scale where Search Console becomes tedious: which pages exclude themselves, which are blocked, which contradict their own canonical.

VeriFixScan reads `seo.noindex` on every crawled page and reports the ones carrying the directive, with the place it was found.

`seo.canonical` reports pages whose canonical points somewhere other than themselves, which is the second most common reason a page is absent from results without being blocked.

`seo.robots_txt` reports what the file allows, which is the third.

A scan cannot tell you what Google decided. It tells you what your own site instructed, which is the part you control.