site: operator

Definition

site: limits a Google search to one domain, URL or URL prefix. Google's documentation gives two basic forms: site:example.com returns results from that domain including subdomains such as www.example.com and recipes.example.com, and site:https://www.example.com/ramen tsukemen returns pages under that prefix that are relevant to the term "tsukemen". The operator works on all Google Search properties.

In practice

Google lists several debugging uses for site owners:

Search Console Help suggests the same exact-URL check to owners of small sites who want to confirm key pages are indexed without learning the full Page indexing report.

Limitations

Google states that the operator "doesn't necessarily return all the URLs that are indexed" under the prefix, and that a query with no search terms does not rank results: the shortest URL generally appears first and the rest is relatively random. Two consequences follow:

• the result count is not an index count, so it should not be used to measure site size;
• a missing result for a single URL is weak evidence. The page may be indexed under a different canonical URL or simply not surface.

For pages you own, URL Inspection in Search Console is authoritative.

Relation to backlink indexing

For pages on other people's sites, site: on the exact URL is the most common manual check of whether a backlink's host page is indexed. Doing it by hand does not scale past a few dozen links, which is why bulk index checkers automate the query. Good checkers combine it with other forms such as the inurl: operator and the quoted URL to reduce false negatives. IndexChex uses site: as one of four query forms in its checks, alongside its backlink indexing submissions.

Related terms

• inurl: operator
• Index checker
• Indexing

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