Type “is my page indexed” into a search engine and you get a row of tools that promise a yes-or-no answer from a URL. Ours is one of them. Before you lean on any of them, including the one we run, it helps to know what a tool like this can and cannot see.

What a crawler actually checks

An index checker fetches your page and reads it. From that it can tell you whether the page is eligible for indexing: it returns HTTP 200, nothing in robots.txt blocks it, there is no noindex, the canonical points somewhere sane, and the redirect chain resolves. That is a real answer to a real question. It is not the same question as “is this page in Google’s index right now.”

A page can pass every technical check and still not be indexed, because Google also decides based on quality, duplication, and how much crawl attention the URL earns. A crawler cannot see any of that. It sees your server’s response, not Google’s judgement.

The “site:” query is not the index

Some tools run a site:example.com/page search and report whether a result comes back. This is a weak proxy. The site: operator is not real-time, it does not reflect the full index, it gets rate-limited and blocked, and a missing result does not reliably mean “not indexed.” We do not do this, and you should not build decisions on a tool that does.

For a page you own, there is one source of truth

Google Search Console. The URL Inspection API returns Google’s own verdict for a specific URL on a property you have verified: indexed or not, which canonical Google picked, when it was last crawled, and the coverage state behind it. That is the reason the product is built around connecting Search Console rather than around our crawler. The crawler is the fallback for when there is no GSC data yet, and we label everything it produces as inferred.

We keep the two apart on purpose. Google’s answer goes in one field and never gets edited. Our inference goes in a separate field with its own reason string. A tool that blends “our crawl thinks” and “Google says” into a single status is hiding which one you are looking at, and that is how people end up fixing the wrong thing.

Where the free checker is useful

It answers one question fast, with no login: is there a technical blocker on this URL? If it comes back clean and Search Console still shows the page as not indexed, that is a useful result. It tells you the problem is the content or the crawl priority, not a stray noindex or a broken canonical. You have ruled out the five-minute fixes and you know where to look next.

When you need to know what Google actually did, and to be told the day it changes, connect the property. See what that costs.