How the Google Indexing API Works (and What GoIndexed Does With It)

What the Google Indexing API is

The Google Indexing API is an official Google service that lets website owners notify Google when a page has been added or updated. It asks Google to prioritise crawling that URL sooner than it otherwise would.

It does not guarantee indexing — Google still evaluates the page for quality. But it significantly speeds up the process compared to waiting for Google to discover and crawl the page on its own.

How GoIndexed uses it

GoIndexed connects to the Indexing API using a service account you provide. Every night, GoIndexed inspects your URLs via the Search Console API to find pages that aren't indexed, then automatically submits them to the Indexing API.

This means instead of manually requesting indexing one URL at a time in Search Console, GoIndexed does it automatically across all your failing and neutral URLs.

The 200 URLs/day quota

Google limits each service account (GCP project) to 200 Indexing API requests per day. This quota resets at midnight Pacific Time.

GoIndexed prioritises URLs in order of importance — newly discovered failing pages first — so your most important URLs always get submitted within the quota.

What happens after a URL is submitted

• Google adds the URL to a priority crawl queue — it's not instant, but typically faster than organic crawl scheduling
• Google crawls the page and evaluates it for quality
• If the page meets Google's quality bar, it gets indexed — usually within hours to a few days
• If the page has a noindex tag or content issues, it won't be indexed regardless of the API submission

What the Indexing API doesn't do

• It doesn't bypass Google's quality evaluation — low-quality pages won't be indexed just because you submitted them
• It doesn't work without a verified service account added as a Search Console owner
• It doesn't override noindex tags or robots.txt blocks