A page that is not in the index cannot rank, cannot pass the value of a link, and will not show up in any report you run. New pages, migrated pages and the backlinks you paid for all share the same first question: is it indexed? There are three honest ways to answer it, and each one has a blind spot the others cover.
Method 1 — Ask the search engine directly
The manual way works on any page, owned or not. In Google, search for
site:example.com/the-page; a result means the page is indexed, and none usually means
it is not. Searching the bare URL in quotes works too. In Bing the same site:
operator behaves the same way.
Three caveats. A site: search is a sample, not a database read: Google routinely omits
indexed pages from it, especially on large sites, so "no result" is a strong hint rather than proof.
Results are personalised and regional, so two people can see different answers. And it does not
scale — thirty pages is an afternoon, three thousand is not an option. Use it for one page you
want to check right now.
Method 2 — The search consoles, when you own the site
If the site is yours, Google Search
Console is the authoritative answer for Google. Paste the URL into URL Inspection and it says
"URL is on Google" or "URL is not on Google", and — more useful — why: crawled but currently not
indexed, discovered but not crawled, excluded by a noindex tag, blocked by
robots.txt, or a canonical pointing elsewhere. The Pages report gives the same verdict for the
whole property, and a Request Indexing button asks for a recrawl of one URL at a time.
Bing Webmaster Tools has the equivalent URL inspection and a URL submission quota. Both consoles only speak for properties you have verified, both inspect one URL at a time by hand, and Search Console's API caps inspections at a couple of thousand a day. For your own site, this is the method; for a backlink on somebody else's site, it cannot help.
Method 3 — A tool or an API, when you have a list
Indexing tools automate method 1 at scale, on any site. Ours is the
Google index checker API: one call per target answers
indexed: true or false, with the sample results Google returned as
evidence, the engine that answered, and a verify_url you can open to see it yourself.
A bare domain asks whether the site has indexed pages at all; a full URL asks about one page.
$ curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
"https://seometricsapi.com/v1/index?target=https://example.com/new-page&samples=3"
{ "data": { "target": "https://example.com/new-page", "is_url_check": true,
"indexed": false, "indexed_sample_count": 0, "samples": [],
"verify_url": "https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aexample.com%2Fnew-page",
"engine": "serper", "truncated": false }, "meta": { "cost_units": 1 } }
The answer is a real one: false means the engine looked and found nothing, and an
engine that cannot tell reports an error instead of guessing. Loop over a list at your plan's
rate — a thousand URLs take a few minutes on a paid key — and repeated checks inside the cache
window cost nothing. A free key carries 100 credits a month, which is 100 fresh checks.
When a page comes back false and you need it crawled, the
link indexing API submits it to an indexing queue, in a standard
mode for volume or an advanced mode that Googlebot follows within minutes. Check again a day later;
a page that is thin, duplicated, blocked or erroring stays out whatever you submit.
Which one, when
| Situation | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One page, right now | Manual site: search | Ten seconds, no account. |
| Your own site, and you want the reason | Search Console / Bing Webmaster Tools | The only source that says why a page is out. |
| A page you do not own — a backlink, a competitor | Manual search or the API | The consoles cannot see it. |
| Hundreds of URLs, or a check that runs on a schedule | The API | A verdict per URL, with evidence, in a loop. |
Whichever you use, treat "not indexed" as a symptom and look for the cause before submitting the
page anywhere: a noindex tag, a canonical to another URL, a 404 behind a redirect, or
a page that simply has nothing on it. Indexing follows crawlability and content; the tools only
tell you where you stand.