Search Console in 10 minutes
Search Console is Google's free dashboard for your site. It's the only place that tells you, page by page, whether Google has indexed something and why not.
1. Add the site
- Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with the Google account you'll keep.
- Choose Domain (covers http, https, www and subdomains) and enter your bare domain.
- Google shows a TXT record. Add it in your domain's DNS (where you manage the domain: Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Wix, Namecheap…). Click Verify; if it fails, wait an hour and try again.
2. Submit the sitemap
Sitemaps → enter sitemap.xml (most platforms generate it at that address) → Submit. If it says "couldn't fetch", open yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml in a browser to see whether it exists.
3. Request indexing for a page
Paste the page address in the search bar at the top (URL inspection). If it says "URL is not on Google", click Request indexing. One request per page; it can take days.
4. Read the Pages report
Indexing → Pages lists every reason pages were left out: "Excluded by noindex tag", "Blocked by robots.txt", "Crawled, currently not indexed" (Google saw it and chose not to list it, usually thin or duplicate content), "Discovered, currently not indexed" (queued). Each links to the pages affected.
Google: URL Inspection Tool · checked Oct 2026