The Page indexing report is a report in Google Search Console that shows how many of your known URLs Google has indexed, and lists a reason for every URL it has left out. Before 2022 it was called the Index Coverage report, and many guides still use that name. You find it under Indexing, then Pages.
How the Page indexing report works
The report starts with a chart of indexed and not indexed pages over time. Below it, the “Why pages aren’t indexed” table groups the excluded URLs by reason. Clicking a reason shows example URLs (up to 1,000 per reason) and lets you inspect each one.
The reasons fall roughly into three groups:
Deliberate exclusions, usually fine
- Page with redirect The URL forwards elsewhere, so the destination is indexed instead.
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag Google has accepted your canonical tag pointing to another version.
- Excluded by noindex tag You asked Google not to index the page. Fine if intended, serious if not.
Errors to fix
- Server error (5xx) and Not found (404) on pages that should exist.
- Blocked by robots.txt on pages you want in search.
- Soft 404 The page returns a normal status but looks empty or like an error to Google.
Google’s own judgement
- Discovered, currently not indexed Google knows the URL but has not crawled it yet, often a sign of a large site or weak internal links.
- Crawled, currently not indexed Google fetched the page and chose not to index it, usually because it judged the content thin, duplicated or not useful enough.
- Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user Google disagreed with your canonical tag and picked another version.
You can filter the whole report to the URLs in a submitted sitemap, which is the most useful view: it shows how many of the pages you actually care about are indexed.
Why it matters
A page that is not indexed cannot appear in search at all, however good it is. For a new UK site, this report is often the first place a serious launch problem shows up, such as a staging noindex left on or a robots.txt rule blocking a whole section. On an established site, a sudden rise in “Crawled, currently not indexed” can be an early warning that Google is losing confidence in a template or a block of content.
Common mistakes
- Trying to reach zero excluded pages. Most sites have many correctly excluded URLs, such as redirects, parameter URLs and alternate versions with a canonical elsewhere.
- Treating every reason as an error. Only exclusions affecting pages you want indexed need action.
- Clicking “Validate fix” before fixing. Validation re-checks the URLs; if nothing changed, it fails and you have wasted weeks.
- Requesting indexing page by page as a strategy. If Google will not index a page, the cause is usually content or linking, and resubmitting does not change that.
- Reading the data as live. The report lags by several days.
How to act on it
Filter the report to your XML sitemap so you are looking at intended pages only. For each reason affecting those pages, open a few example URLs with the URL Inspection tool to confirm what Google sees.
Fix errors first: remove stray noindex tags, correct robots.txt, repair broken templates and server faults. Then deal with the judgement calls. For pages crawled but not indexed, improve or merge thin content and strengthen internal links; for canonical disagreements, remove the duplicate signals that confuse Google. Only when the cause is fixed should you click Validate fix and let Google re-check.
If the reasons point to something structural, such as thousands of filter URLs or a template producing near-duplicate pages, my technical SEO service works through exactly this report as a starting point.