Indexing
Storing a crawled page in a search engine's index so it can appear in results. Crawled is not the same as indexed.
Indexing is the step where a search engine processes a page it has crawled and stores it in its index — the vast database it searches when someone runs a query. A page has to be indexed before it can rank for anything. Crawling and indexing are distinct: an engine can fetch a page and still decide not to index it.
Pages commonly fail to get indexed because they're blocked, marked noindex, judged duplicate (canonicalized to another URL), or simply deemed too low-value to be worth storing — Search Console reports these as "Crawled - currently not indexed" or "Discovered - currently not indexed." On a young or thin site, low-quality pages competing for indexing is a real drag.
You improve indexing by making pages genuinely worth indexing, keeping the URL space clean, providing an accurate sitemap, linking pages internally so they're discoverable, and submitting important URLs through Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. For AI search this is foundational: a page that isn't indexed on Google or Bing generally can't be cited by the AI systems that draw on those indexes.
Related terms
- Canonical Tag — A rel="canonical" link that names the preferred URL for a page, telling search engines which version to index when duplicates exist.
- Noindex — A directive that tells search engines to keep a page out of their index. The page must stay crawlable for the tag to be seen.
- XML Sitemap — A machine-readable list of the canonical, indexable URLs on a site, submitted to search engines to aid discovery.
- robots.txt — A file at the site root that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing.