Inspectors / INS-02 Runs in your browser
Google Index Checker: Build site: Queries for a Whole URL List
Paste a list of URLs and get one ready-made site: query per address, openable one at a time, plus a copyable batch. It also explains what an empty result does and does not prove.
Inspector INS-02 Builds queries — does not run them
Paste straight from a sitemap or a spreadsheet column; stray commas and quotes are stripped.
Exact is the one to use for a yes-or-no answer.
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Open them a few at a time. Firing off fifty searches in a minute is what triggers a captcha, and a captcha page tells you nothing about your URLs.
Indexing and ranking are two separate questions
Indexed means Google has crawled a page, decided it is worth storing, and put it in the index. Ranking means that stored page competes for a particular query. A page can be indexed and appear for nothing anyone searches, which is the normal state of most pages on the web.
Sorting out which of the two you have is the first useful step, because the fixes have nothing in common. A page that is not indexed has a technical or discovery problem: blocked, noindexed, canonicalised elsewhere, or simply never linked to. A page that is indexed and invisible has a competitive problem, and no amount of resubmitting will touch it.
A site: sweep separates the two cheaply. Run it across a batch of URLs, and the ones that return nothing are your technical list. Everything else belongs in the performance report.
Why this tool builds queries instead of running them
Google publishes no index-status endpoint, and it blocks automated querying deliberately. No page in a browser can request another origin either, because browsers forbid it unless the other origin agrees, and Google does not.
So a tool that promises to check a hundred URLs automatically is doing one of two things. It is scraping results through rotating proxies, which produces answers polluted by captcha pages and regional variation; or it is querying a third-party index that is not Google's, and reporting its coverage as if it were.
Building the queries and handing them to you keeps the answer trustworthy. You see what Google actually returns, in your own session, with no layer in between deciding what to report.
The four query forms and when each is the right one
The exact URL answers the yes-or-no question for one page. This is the default and it is what you want when working through a list.
The path prefix shows everything indexed under a folder. Useful for spotting the opposite problem: paginated archives, tag pages or query-string variants that got indexed and are competing with the page you meant to rank.
The inurl: form finds near-duplicates of a slug across the site. That is how you catch two versions of the same article living at different addresses, one of which is quietly outranking the other.
A plain search for the URL shows how the page is currently described: the title and snippet Google chose. When those differ from what you wrote, you are looking at a page Google has decided to describe on your behalf, which is worth knowing.
What to do with the pages that come back empty
Work through four checks in order, because each is cheaper than the one after it. Is the path disallowed in robots.txt. Does the page carry a noindex tag. Does its canonical point at itself or at something else. Is it linked from any page that is already indexed.
The fourth catches more than the first three combined. Pages that only exist in a sitemap, with no internal link pointing at them, are crawled reluctantly and dropped easily. A sitemap is a hint; an internal link is a route.
Once you have a cause, confirm with URL Inspection rather than with another site: query. Inspection reads Google's own record for your property and will tell you the last crawl date, the canonical it chose, and whether it considers the page indexable — none of which a search result reveals.
Pace the checking
Open a handful of queries, read them, then continue. Rapid-fire searching triggers the interstitial captcha, and once that appears your results are meaningless until it clears.
For a list beyond a few dozen URLs, the sweep stops being the right instrument. Export the page indexing report from Search Console instead: it covers the whole property at once, tells you why each excluded URL was excluded, and does not depend on an unofficial operator behaving consistently.
Questions people ask
Why does the tool not just tell me whether the page is indexed?
Because doing that from a page in your browser is impossible without breaking something. Google has no public endpoint for index status, blocks automated queries, and a static site cannot make cross-origin requests anyway.
Any tool that claims to check hundreds of URLs at once is either scraping through a proxy pool, which returns stale and captcha-poisoned results, or paying for a third-party index whose coverage is nothing like Google's. Building the queries for you and letting you look is the honest version.
What does an empty site: result actually prove?
Less than people assume. A site: query with no result is decent evidence the URL is not indexed, but it is not proof: the operator is unofficial, filtered, and has been known to omit pages that are indexed and rank normally.
The authoritative answer is the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, which reads Google's own record for your property. Use site: for a quick sweep, and Inspection when the answer matters.
My page shows in site: but gets no traffic. Is it indexed?
Yes, and that is a different problem. Being indexed means Google has stored the page. Ranking means it competes for a query. Most pages that disappoint are indexed and simply not competitive.
When that is the pattern, the diagnosis lives in the performance report, not here. Look for the queries the page receives impressions on, and whether the position is 15 or 95.
Should I submit every URL manually to get it indexed?
No. Manual submission is rate-limited and is designed for one-off cases: a page you just fixed, or something newly published that matters urgently.
For everything else, a sitemap plus internal links from pages already crawled does the work. A URL that internal linking never reaches is a structural problem that submission will not solve, because the page will drop out again.
How long should a new page take to appear?
On an established site with regular publishing, hours to a few days. On a new domain with few links, several weeks is normal and not a fault.
If a page is still missing after a month and it is linked from your homepage, look for the cause rather than resubmitting: a stray noindex tag, a canonical pointing elsewhere, or a robots.txt rule blocking the path.
Is anything I type sent anywhere?
No. The tool runs in this page and there is no server behind it, so nothing you type is transmitted, logged or stored. Disconnect from the network, reload from cache, and it still works.