Crawled - currently not indexed: what Google is telling you

What does crawled - currently not indexed mean?

Nothing is broken. Googlebot reached the page without trouble, and Google then decided it was not worth storing.

Google’s own help text describes it as “a common message for many sites,” one that “doesn’t necessarily indicate an issue that needs attention.” Google also says it “doesn’t index all pages across the web,” so seeing some URLs here is expected on any site.

The neighbouring status, Discovered - currently not indexed, stops a step sooner: Google has the address but has not fetched it, so there is no last crawl date. With Crawled, Google has seen what is on the page and turned it down.

Does it matter?

For a WordPress tag archive, no. For your R&D tax claims page, yes. Open the status in the Page indexing report and read through the example URLs before changing anything.

• A few stray URLsTag and author archives, RSS feeds, ?sort= and ?filter= versions of a list, internal site search results, a campaign page from three years ago. Google is choosing one version out of several near-identical ones, which is what you want. Leave them.
• A page that wins workYour contract recruitment page, a service-plus-place page such as payroll bureau in Leeds, a sector page for law firms or manufacturers, an office page. These bring in enquiries, so they are worth fixing.
• Most of the siteIf only a small share of your pages are indexed and nothing technical is in the way, Google is weighing up the site as a whole, not one page. Adding noindex to half the site will not change that judgement. The fix is better pages, covered further down.

Does it keep you out of AI answers?

Out of Google’s, yes. Google’s rule for AI Overviews and AI Mode is that “a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.” A page in this status fails the first part, so neither feature can link to it.

It tells you nothing about ChatGPT or Bing, which do their own crawling. OpenAI says its OAI-SearchBot crawler is used to “surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features,” so check robots.txt does not block it (our robots.txt checker will show you). Bing keeps a separate index: add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools, inspect the page there, and use IndexNow to tell Bing when a page changes. How to rank in ChatGPT covers the rest.

How do you fix crawled - currently not indexed?

For a page that matters, work through these in order. The first two take a few minutes. The third is where the real effort goes.

1. Run the live testPut the URL into URL Inspection in Search Console and test the live version. Look for a robots.txt block, a forgotten noindex, a server error, or a canonical tag naming a different page.
2. Rule out a near-copyGoogle groups pages that say much the same thing and keeps the one it thinks best represents them. On service business sites the usual pairs are location pages built from one template with only the town names changed, separate pages for “office cleaning” and “commercial cleaning” that read the same, and office pages that differ only by address. Merge them, or give each a reason to exist.
3. Add what only you can sayA location page that just swaps Leeds for Bristol is the classic case. Add what is true of that place alone: the team who covers it, the sectors you work with there, response times, how site visits work, the questions clients there ask. Real detail from your own work is the thing a template cannot produce.
4. Link to it from pages Google already visitsYour homepage, the services menu, or a hub page listing your locations or sectors. Keep it in your sitemap with an accurate lastmod date. For many pages at once, Google suggests submitting a sitemap.
5. Ask once, then waitPress Request indexing for one page, or Validate fix for the whole group. There is a daily limit on requests, and Google says “indexing is never instant, even when you submit a crawl request directly.” Validation “typically takes up to about two weeks,” sometimes longer. Do not press Validate fix again until it has passed or failed.

What if most of the site is crawled but not indexed?

The five steps still apply, but going page by page will not get you there. Google comes round to a site through its best pages, not through the number of pages.

1. Pick the pages customers needYour main services, the places and sectors you actually win work in, accreditations such as ICAEW membership, Cyber Essentials or ISO 9001, and a few useful guides on topics like IR35 or Making Tax Digital. It is usually a short list. Make those the best pages on their subject before you publish anything else.
2. Stop making pages that change one wordHundreds of “[service] in [town]” pages with the same body text are the pattern Google groups and drops. Keep a template only where each page carries something real of its own, such as local team details, response times for that area or client questions.
3. Merge rather than deleteFold three thin office or location pages into one that is worth reading. The aim is better pages, not fewer of them.

Getting every page your customers need seen by Google and by the crawlers behind AI tools is the first stage of our work for service businesses, on one plan at £1,750 a month.

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