Frequently asked questions

Indexly connects to your Google Search Console, compares the pages in your sitemap with what Google actually holds in its index every day, and automatically submits the pages that are missing.

Anyone with a website whose pages change or grow regularly: webshops, news sites, job boards and larger company sites. The more pages, the greater the chance part of them quietly stays out of the index.

No script, plugin or code. One exception: for IndexNow you place a single text file holding a key on your domain, so search engines can establish that a notification really comes from the owner. Your pages themselves stay untouched.

We fetch the page and compare a fingerprint of the parts that matter for indexing: the title, the meta description, the canonical, the robots directive, the first H1, the main content and the structured data. Navigation, footer and dates are deliberately left out; they change on every visit, which would make every page look changed all the time. Only a real change sends the page through the pipeline again.

We fetch pages with a recognisable user agent, so your log shows it is us. We honour your robots.txt and never request faster than necessary. Of the page we keep only the fingerprint, not the content.

Access to your Search Console data and permission to submit pages for indexing. You grant that permission at Google itself; we never see your password and cannot change anything in your Google account.

Yes, with one button in the dashboard. We then also revoke the permission at Google itself, so nothing is left hanging in your Google account.

Without owner or full access, Google gives us no information about your pages and accepts no requests on your behalf.

Yes, that is a mandatory step. Google allows 200 submissions per day per Cloud project, for the whole project and not per website. With a project of your own those 200 are yours instead of shared with other customers, and it costs you nothing: Google's API is free. A wizard in the dashboard walks you through it and verifies every step with Google itself; allow about ten to twenty minutes. Until the project exists we can show you which pages are missing, but cannot submit anything. We stay under that with a margin of our own: 180 submissions a day for your whole account, and at most 50 per website — so one site cannot drain the project at the expense of the others.

No. The Cloud project is for Google alone. IndexNow works with one key file on your own domain and has no project, no service account and no daily quota. So while your Cloud project is still being set up, the IndexNow notifications simply carry on.

Through IndexNow we announce your changes to Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep. Because the Bing index also feeds DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, one notification travels further than those five names suggest.

No. Google is not connected to IndexNow. These are two separate channels side by side: Google is served through the Indexing API and your sitemap, the other search engines through IndexNow. You get both, but one is not a replacement for the other.

Up to 10,000 URLs per message, with no daily quota. At Google the ceiling is 200 submissions per day per Cloud project. So a bulk import or a migration of thousands of pages travels through IndexNow in one go.

Yes. The protocol is officially intended for all types of pages: a blog post, a product page, a category. That is the sharpest difference with Google, which describes its own Indexing API as intended for job posting pages and live streams; other use there is merely tolerated.

Honest answer: Bing and Yandex together are a small share of search traffic in the Netherlands, so do not expect your numbers to double. The gain is coverage and speed — your new pages are known outside Google as well, without you having to do anything for it.

No, and nobody can. Google decides which pages enter the index. What Indexly does: establish daily what is missing, submit it properly within Google's limits, and show what comes of it.

Indexing and ranking are two different things. A page that is not in the index cannot be found at all; a page that is still has to earn its position. Indexly is about the first.

Then the dashboard shows the reason Google attaches, for example that the page was crawled but not indexed, or that Google chose a different canonical. That reason is the starting point for improving the page itself.

Six moments per URL: last changed, discovered by us, fetched by Google, indexed, first impression and first click. That shows you where the time goes — in discovery, in the fetching, or in being taken into the index.

All but one are not. Only the crawl moment comes straight from Google; the rest are our observations. Google does not tell you when it indexed something, we know when we first saw it. That is why it reads 'established on' rather than 'happened on': the real event sits between the previous check and that observation.

No more accurate than how often we check. Recently changed pages come up more often than pages that have not moved in years, so their figure sits closer to reality. Use it to compare websites and parts of your site against each other; then those differences weigh equally on both sides.

Yes. Every day we compare the number of indexed pages against the previous measurement. If it falls by at least 5 pages and at least 2%, the drop appears on your dashboard. The email has a separate, higher threshold — at least 3 pages and at least 5% across your whole account compared with a week earlier — so you are not emailed every day about the same fluctuation. On a website of thousands of pages you would otherwise only notice a deindexation once the traffic had already gone.

How many pages disappeared, and where they sat: broken down by the folder in the path, by the sitemap file the URL came from, and by the reason Google gave. That breakdown is in the email itself, so you know where to look before you open the dashboard. Note that these are three breakdowns of the same loss, so the numbers must not be added together — every page appears in all three.

No, and we say so in the alert. We do not measure Google's index but our own check: at the last check, Google reported fewer pages as indexed than at the one before. That may be a genuine deindexation, or a check that ran into a daily quota halfway through. So every alert states how many pages were actually checked, and the dashboard flags 'measurement may be incomplete' in plain sight whenever that number came out unusually low.

€7.50 per month for your account plus €2.49 per website, excluding VAT. You cancel monthly and only pay for the websites you have active.

The URLs of your website, what Google says about those URLs, and when we submitted or announced a page. Plus your account and company details. To see whether a page changed we fetch it, but all we keep of it is a fingerprint — the content of your pages is not stored.

On servers within the European Union. The privacy statement sets out exactly which data we process, why, and how long we keep it.