Indexing
SEO and AI visibility
SEO and AI visibility
Indexing is a crawled page being stored in the search engine's database. Only indexed pages can appear in results.
Crawled is not the same as indexed. Google may decide not to store a page because it's too similar to another one, adds too little, or is explicitly excluded with a noindex instruction.
Search Console shows the indexing status per page and the reason for exclusion. That report is the first thing to open when new pages stay invisible.
Related terms
- CrawlingCrawling is a search engine fetching your pages by following links. No crawl means no index, and no index means no ranking.
- CanonicalA canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page that is reachable at several addresses.
- SitemapAn XML sitemap is a list of the URLs you want indexed, meant for search engines.