An index checker tells you whether a specific URL is actually indexed by Google — separate from whether it's live, crawlable, or in your sitemap. A page can pass every other check and still not be indexed. Here are four ways to check, from a 10-second manual lookup to bulk-checking an entire site.
Method 1 — The site: Search Operator
The fastest manual check. Search site:example.com/your-page-url in Google. If the page appears in results, it's indexed. If nothing shows up, it likely isn't — though this isn't 100% definitive, since Google occasionally omits indexed pages from site: results for reasons unrelated to indexing status. Good for a quick spot check, not for anything you need to be certain about.
Method 2 — Google Search Console URL Inspection
The definitive single-URL check. In Search Console, paste any URL from your property into the inspection bar at the top. It returns Google's actual index status — whether the page is indexed, when it was last crawled, and if it's not indexed, the specific reason (crawl budget, quality signals, a noindex tag, a canonical pointing elsewhere, and so on). This is the source of truth; site: search is just a proxy for it.
Method 3 — The Page Indexing Report (Whole-Site Overview)
For a site-wide view rather than one URL at a time, go to Indexing → Pages in Search Console. It groups every URL Google has discovered into indexed vs not-indexed, with a breakdown of why for each excluded group. This is the right starting point when you want to know your overall index rate — the percentage of submitted pages that are actually indexed — rather than checking pages one by one.
Method 4 — Bulk Index Checking
The URL Inspection tool is precise but manual — checking hundreds of URLs one at a time isn't practical. Search Console's own URL Inspection API supports this programmatically, but it's rate-limited to a small daily quota per property, which is why dedicated bulk index-checking tools exist: they pull indexing data at scale using your Search Console access, showing verdict, coverage state, and last-crawl date for every URL in one pass instead of one-by-one lookups.
If you already connect your sitemap tool to Google Search Console, this data is often available directly — pulling GSC's indexing verdict for every URL in your sitemap in one batch, rather than needing a separate index-checking tool on top.
What "Not Indexed" Actually Means
An index checker tells you the status, not the cause. "Not indexed" covers several very different situations — the page hasn't been crawled yet, it was crawled but rejected for quality reasons, it's blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag, or it redirects elsewhere. Each has a different fix. See our guide on why Google isn't indexing your pages for how to diagnose and resolve each category.
How Often to Check
For a handful of high-priority pages (a new product launch, a key landing page), check within a few days of publishing and again a week or two later if it hasn't appeared. For ongoing monitoring across a whole site, a monthly bulk check is enough to catch pages that silently dropped out of the index — which happens more often than most site owners expect, especially after content updates or site migrations.