URL Inspection — is this page actually indexed?
Submitted ≠ indexed. The weekly recheck cron confirms which URLs Google really put in its index, with the reason for any that didn't make it.
When you submit a URL to the Indexing API, all Google guarantees is that they've received your request — not that they've actually added the page to their index. The only way to know for sure is to ask Google's URL Inspection API, which returns the same status you'd see in Search Console's URL Inspection tool.
ItzSEO does this two ways:
- Weekly automatic recheck — Sundays at 02:00 UTC, a cron walks every project with GSC service- account ownership and inspects the 20 most-stale URLs (never-checked first, then 7+ days old). Updates the Indexed column and the coverage progress bar at the top of the page.
- On-demand inspection — click the eye icon on any row to recheck that one URL right now. Useful after you've just published a fix and want to confirm Google saw it. Owner/Editor only.
What the verdict means:
- Indexed — green pill. Google has the page in its index; it can show up in search results.
- Not indexed — grey pill with an amber triangle. Hover the pill to see Google's exact reason — common ones include Crawled — currently not indexed (Google fetched it but decided not to index — often a content-quality signal), Discovered — currently not indexed (Google knows about it but hasn't crawled yet), Excluded by 'noindex' tag (you have a meta robots tag telling Google not to), or Page with redirect (Google followed the redirect to a different URL).
- Unknown — outline pill. Never inspected, or the last inspection failed. Click the eye icon to run a fresh inspection.
Prerequisite — URL Inspection requires our service account to be a verified Owner of the GSC site, not just a Viewer. In Search Console go to Settings → Users and permissions, find the email analytics-reader@…iam.gserviceaccount.com, and upgrade it to Owner. If you skip this step the cron and the eye button will return a clear permission error rather than silently breaking.
How fast does “not indexed” become “indexed”? Google's own timeline. The fastest path is: submit via the Indexing API, then make sure the page is actually high quality and linked from somewhere discoverable. The recheck cron will pick up the status change within a week — or you can poke it sooner with the eye button.