Key takeaways
- This entry page explains the difference, why “crawled” doesn’t imply “indexed”, and how to diagnose the gap using GSC statuses and system signals
Table of Contents
People say “Google crawled my page, so it should be indexed.”
That assumption was never fully true, and in 2026 it’s increasingly wrong.
Mechanism: crawl vs index (one sentence each)
- Crawl means: Google fetched the URL and processed it.
- Index means: Google decided it’s worth storing a representation and refreshing it over time.
The gap between those states is where most modern indexing work lives.
If you want the full pipeline map:
Common misconceptions
Misconception 1: “Crawled means the page passed quality”
Not necessarily. Crawling is just fetching. The system can fetch pages it later discards as low priority, duplicate, or ambiguous.
Misconception 2: “Request indexing will fix it”
Requesting indexing can accelerate a fetch. It does not override the storage decision.
Misconception 3: “If it’s not indexed, it’s a technical bug”
Sometimes it’s technical (noindex, robots, canonicals, soft 404). Often it’s prioritization: cost/value/risk at the site level.
Real-world scenarios (use the right entry page)
Scenario A: Discovered — currently not indexed
Google knows the URL exists but hasn’t allocated crawl + processing.
Scenario B: Crawled — currently not indexed
Google can fetch the URL, but decided not to store it (yet).
Scenario C: Crawled, not indexed (deep)
The “what actually moves the needle” layer (priority and coherence).
System-level insight: indexing is a cost decision
Google can crawl far more than it wants to store.
So it behaves like a curator:
- keep what is useful, distinct, and cheap to understand
- discard what is redundant, noisy, or expensive to refresh
That’s why “fixing one page” often fails: the bottleneck is the site graph.
System context
Next step
If you want the step-by-step mechanics of how URLs turn into stored documents, read next: