Free indexability checker
Enter a URL to find out whether search engines can index it. The tool tests all five signals that decide the answer — status code, robots meta tag, X-Robots-Tag header, canonical and robots.txt — and reports which one is blocking, if any.
The blocker you cannot see
Four of the five signals are visible if you know where to look. The fifth is not. An X-Robots-Tag: noindex header lives in the HTTP response, never appears in view-source, and carries exactly the same weight as the meta tag. It gets applied at the server or CDN level, often to a whole path pattern, by someone who is no longer on the project.
That combination — total effect, zero visibility — makes it the single most frustrating cause of a missing page. If you have checked the HTML and found nothing, this is usually the answer.
Why robots.txt and noindex conflict
The two are not interchangeable and using both is usually a mistake. Disallow in robots.txt stops the crawl. noindex stops the indexing. Apply both to the same page and the crawler is forbidden from fetching the page, so it never reads the noindex — the page can stay in the index indefinitely, listed as a bare URL.
To remove a page from search, allow the crawl and use noindex. To keep a crawler out of a directory it has no business in, use robots.txt. The robots.txt checker tests the crawl side against the real longest-match rules.
The canonical trap in templates
A canonical tag pointing at another URL tells Google that URL is the one to index. That is correct and useful when two URLs genuinely serve the same content. It is quietly destructive when a template hardcodes a single canonical — every page in the section then nominates the same URL, and Google drops all of them but one.
This tool reports the canonical it found and flags when it points away from the URL you entered. It normalizes trailing slashes and www. so those are not reported as conflicts when they are just formatting. To compare two pages that may genuinely be duplicates, use the duplicate content checker.
Indexable is the floor, not the goal
Passing every check here means nothing is stopping the page. It does not mean the page will be indexed, and it certainly does not mean it will rank. Google crawls what it can find and stores what it judges worth storing. If the verdict is green and the page is still absent, why a website is not showing up on Google covers what comes next, and the free website audit checks the rest of the technical picture in one pass.
Indexability questions
- What does indexable mean?
- Indexable means nothing is preventing a search engine from storing the page and showing it in results. It is a precondition for ranking, not ranking itself — an indexable page with nothing worth reading will sit in the index and never appear for anything.
- What stops a page being indexed?
- Five things, in rough order of how often they are the culprit: a noindex robots meta tag, an X-Robots-Tag header carrying noindex, a canonical tag pointing at a different URL, a non-200 HTTP status, and a robots.txt rule blocking the crawl. This tool checks all five in one request.
- What is the X-Robots-Tag header?
- The X-Robots-Tag is a noindex instruction sent in the HTTP response headers rather than the HTML. It carries exactly the same weight as the meta tag and is completely invisible in view-source, so it is the blocker people search for hardest and find last. Most free checkers never look at it.
- Can a canonical tag de-index a page?
- Effectively yes. A canonical pointing at a different URL tells Google that the other page is the version to index, so this one is dropped in its favor. It is a soft signal rather than a directive, but Google follows it most of the time — and a template that hardcodes one canonical across many pages is a common way to lose them all at once.
- Why is my page indexable but not in Google?
- Indexable means allowed, not indexed. Google still has to discover the page, choose to crawl it, and decide it is worth storing. A new page with no internal links pointing at it and no sitemap entry can wait a long time, and a page Google judges thin or duplicated may be crawled and then not indexed at all.
- How long does indexing take?
- Anything from hours to several weeks. Established sites that publish often get crawled within a day or two. A new domain with few links can wait weeks. Submitting the URL in Search Console and linking to it from a page that already gets crawled are the two things that reliably speed it up.
- Why is my page crawled but not indexed?
- The 'Crawled – currently not indexed' status means Google fetched the page but chose not to add it, usually because it judged the content thin, duplicative or low value. The fix is rarely technical — improve the page so it offers something the already-ranking pages do not, then request indexing again.
- What does 'Discovered – currently not indexed' mean?
- This status means Google knows the URL exists but has not yet crawled it, often because it is conserving crawl budget on a large or slow site. Improving internal links to the page, speeding up the server and keeping the sitemap clean all help Google decide the URL is worth fetching.
- How do I get Google to index my page faster?
- Request indexing through the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, and make sure the page is in your sitemap and linked from other indexed pages. Indexing speed still depends on perceived quality and site authority, so there is no button that forces it — strong internal linking is the most reliable lever.
- Does Google index every page of my website?
- No — Google indexes only the pages it considers worth showing, and routinely leaves out thin, duplicate, or near-empty URLs even when they are crawlable. This is normal, and a site is healthier with fewer strong indexed pages than with many weak ones competing against each other.
- Why is my page not indexed even after requesting indexing?
- Requesting indexing adds a URL to Google's queue but does not force inclusion, so a page can stay out if Google judges it low quality or too similar to existing results. Repeatedly requesting the same unchanged page does not help — change what made Google skip it, usually the depth and uniqueness of the content.
- What is a crawl budget and does it affect indexing?
- Crawl budget is roughly how many URLs Google will fetch from your site in a given period, set by your site's size, speed and authority. It mainly matters for very large sites — on those, wasted crawls on duplicate or blocked URLs can leave good pages undiscovered, so tidy internal linking and a clean sitemap pay off.