Discovered - currently not indexed

Definition

Discovered - currently not indexed is one of the reasons listed in the Why pages aren't indexed table of the Page indexing report. Google's wording is: "The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report."

The key fact is that no crawl has happened. Google has the URL in its list, from a link or a sitemap, but Googlebot has not fetched it.

Why it happens

The documented cause is server load: Google's crawl capacity limit for the host was expected to be exceeded. Google's crawl budget guide names sites with a large share of URLs in this state as one of the audiences for its advice, which ties the status closely to crawl budget. Crawl demand plays a part too. If Google sees many low-value or duplicate URLs on a site, it spends its time there and postpones others.

Typical contributing factors:

• slow server responses, 5xx errors or 429 rate limiting;
• large numbers of parameter, filter or duplicate URLs;
• new sections with few internal links;
• new sites, which Search Console Help says can take a week or so to start being crawled.

What to do

1. Check server health and response times; a faster, more stable host raises crawl capacity.
2. Reduce wasted URLs: consolidate duplicates and block unimportant paths with robots.txt.
3. Link the affected pages from crawled pages and list them in an up-to-date XML sitemap.
4. For a few important pages, request indexing through URL Inspection.

Unlike the crawled state, here a crawl request is relevant, because the crawl is what is missing.

Discovered versus crawled

Pages often move from this reason to Crawled - currently not indexed or to Indexed once Googlebot gets to them. The two labels are easy to confuse but point to different stages: crawling has not happened in one and has happened in the other.

Relation to backlink indexing

Third-party pages hosting backlinks can sit in this state on their owner's site indefinitely, especially deep pages on large, slow hosts. The link builder cannot see the label but sees the result: no crawl, no index entry. Generating discovery and crawl signals for such URLs is the main job of a backlink indexer. IndexChex, which publishes this glossary, targets this stage; it guarantees crawling of submitted URLs, not their indexing.

Related terms

• Crawl budget
• Indexing
• URL indexer

Find other definitions in the A-Z glossary.