What Is the Page Indexing Report in Google Search Console?
This is the report that tells you which of your pages Google has actually stored, plus why the rest are not. It has also been called three different things, which is the real reason most people cannot find what the article they read told them to look for.
It Has Been Called Three Things
If you came here looking for the Coverage report, you are in the right place and it has a different name now. This reporting began as Index Coverage, was reworked substantially in January 2021 and was renamed page indexing during the navigation redesign Google announced in May 2022, when the Coverage section became Pages.
Why the renaming matters. Guidance did not follow.
An enormous quantity of published advice still refers to Coverage, tells you to look at the Valid tab and describes categories that were reworked years ago. None of that matches what you are looking at.
The detail that makes this worse. Google uses the old name too.
In a status announcement about reporting delays in December 2025, Google itself referred to the Index Coverage report. So both names remain in circulation at the source, which is not a criticism and is worth knowing when you are searching.
What that means for this page. Dated and reviewed.
We checked the current name against Google's own documentation before publishing. This page also carries a review date. Anything on this subject without one should be treated with suspicion.
What we will not reproduce. The list of reason labels.
The exact wording of the exclusion categories has changed before and will change again, so this guide explains what each kind of reason means rather than reprinting a set that will date.
Why any of this is worth your time. A page not stored cannot appear.
Everything else in search is downstream of this. A page Google has not kept cannot rank for anything, however well written it is and however much it cost, which makes this the most fundamental report in the tool.
Where the report sits now. Under indexing.
Grouped with the other reporting about what Google has stored rather than with performance. That grouping is itself a hint about what it is for.
Coverage And Index Coverage
Both names referred to this same report. If somebody mentions either, they mean the reporting you are reading about. Nothing has been taken away from you in the rename.
What Index Coverage was. The original.
Introduced with the rebuilt Search Console, showing the state of every address Google had visited or tried to visit on a site. Same purpose, different presentation.
What changed in the 2021 rework. Better reasons.
Google removed a vague catch all category and mapped crawl failures to more specific ones, changed how blocked pages that got stored anyway were reported and improved the accuracy of one particularly confusing category. Counts moved as a result, which alarmed people at the time.
What changed in the rename. Presentation.
The report was reorganised around a simpler split between stored and not stored, with a reason attached to each address in the second group. Less alarming to read and the same information underneath.
Why the old structure still gets described. Articles outlive reports.
Guidance written for the earlier layout is still circulating and still ranking. If something tells you to work through four coloured sections, it was written for a screen nobody can open.
What the rework taught everybody. Counts are not events.
When the categories changed, numbers moved on sites where nothing whatsoever had happened. That is worth remembering the next time a count jumps: reporting changes as well as sites do.
What to take from all this. Check the date.
On anything you read about this report, including this page. Reporting changes and undated guidance is a liability rather than a resource.
What It Actually Shows
Every address Google knows about on your site, sorted into stored and not stored, with a reason attached to everything in the second group. That is the whole report and it is a considerably simpler idea than its reputation suggests.
Stored. Able to appear.
These pages exist as far as search is concerned. Nothing about being stored says they will appear well for anything, which is a separate question the performance reporting answers.
Not stored, with a reason. The useful half.
Each address gets a stated reason for not being kept. Those reasons fall into three broad kinds and telling them apart is the entire skill here.
Reasons that are your instruction. You asked for this.
Pages you told Google to leave alone, addresses that redirect elsewhere and versions pointing at a preferred page. The system agreeing with you.
Reasons that are a judgement. Google decided.
Pages fetched and not kept. Pages known about and never fetched. These are the ones worth reading. the indexing errors guide covers why the two need opposite responses.
Why the three kinds need separating. Opposite responses.
The first group needs nothing. The second needs the page improved or removed. The third needs a technical fix. Treating all three as one list is the reason so much effort here produces nothing.
Reasons that are a fault. Something broke.
Addresses that could not be reached at all. Worth attention where they are pages you rely on and safely ignorable where they are things you retired years ago.
Excluded Pages
Excluded is not an error category. It means not stored, which for a substantial proportion of addresses is exactly what should be happening. A large excluded count is normal and a business treating it as a defect list will spend money achieving nothing.
Why the number gets so large. Sites generate addresses.
Filtered views, sorted views, pagination, tags, search results pages and print versions. A shop with two hundred products can produce thousands of addresses without anybody publishing a page.
Which exclusions are correct. Most of them.
Anything you instructed Google to leave out, anything redirecting somewhere, duplicates where a preferred version was chosen and the generated addresses above. All working as intended.
Which are worth reading. Two kinds.
Pages you wanted stored that are not, plus any category that is growing month on month. The first is a specific problem and the second is a trend, which matters more.
How to read it without panicking. Ask one question.
Can you explain the count. A large number you can account for is fine. A large number you cannot is the thing to investigate. It usually resolves into one or two categories rather than being spread evenly.
The exclusion worth investigating first. Fetched and not kept.
Because it is a judgement about the page rather than a technical outcome. Where that category contains pages you sell from, you have found the most important thing in the report.
What we do with it for clients. Track composition.
Not the total. Which categories make it up and whether that mix is changing, because the mix is where the information is.
Getting A List Of What Is Stored
This report will give you the addresses Google has kept. Exporting that list is the single most useful exercise available here. Compare it against what you have published and the gaps are your answer.
Why this beats guessing. It is definitive.
People try to work out what is indexed by searching for their own pages, which is unreliable and slow. The report has the list.
What to compare it against. Your own inventory.
The pages you believe you have. Most businesses have never written that list down, which is itself worth doing once and is usually revealing on its own.
What the gaps tell you. Where to look.
A commercial page missing from the stored list is a specific and urgent finding. Thirty tag pages missing is not a finding at all.
How often to do it. Quarterly.
This is not a monthly job. Once a quarter, plus after publishing a batch of pages or making a structural change to the site.
What the exercise usually reveals. Pages nobody remembered.
Old landing pages, duplicate service pages from a previous redesign and drafts that were never taken down. Half the value of the comparison is discovering what you are still publishing.
What to do with an individual missing page. Inspect it.
The inspection tool tells you what Google holds for that one address, which is faster than reasoning about it from the aggregate.
The Enhancements Reporting
Alongside the indexing information there is reporting on structured data, which is the code describing your content to search engines. It tells you whether that markup was read successfully. One distinction inside it accounts for most of the frustration people have with the subject.
What it reports. Whether the markup works.
Read successfully, read with warnings or containing an error. Useful, mechanical and exactly what you would expect.
The distinction that matters. Eligible is not shown.
Valid markup means your page is permitted to appear with an enhanced result. It does not mean it will. Google decides case by case. Plenty of correctly marked up pages never get one.
Why that catches people out. Green looks like success.
A report full of ticks reads as achievement. What it actually confirms is that the code is correct, which is a much smaller claim than the one businesses hear.
What warnings usually mean. Optional fields missing.
Frequently worth filling in and frequently not urgent. An error is different, since it means the markup could not be understood at all.
What it does not report. Whether the markup is true.
Code can be perfectly valid and describe something that is not on the page. Nothing in this reporting checks that, which is why the rules about markup describing genuine content sit with us rather than with the tool.
Where this subject lives. Our structured data material.
That covers what markup should assert, why it must describe what is genuinely on the page and the eligible against shown distinction in full. This page only reports that the reporting exists.
Video Pages
There is separate reporting on pages containing video, telling you whether Google found the video on a page and whether it is being handled as a video result. If your site has no video, this section will be empty and can be ignored entirely.
Why it exists separately. Video is handled differently.
A page containing a video can be presented in results in ways an ordinary page cannot, so Google reports on it separately. That is the entire reason for the section.
Who needs it. Sites where video is the point.
Training providers, product demonstrations, anybody publishing genuine video content on their own pages. For those businesses it answers a real question.
What it tells them. Whether the video was found.
Google has to identify a video on the page before it can treat it as one. This reporting is where you discover that it has not, usually because of how the player is embedded.
Why it is here rather than on its own page. Demand.
Almost nobody searches for this and almost nobody needs it, so it is a paragraph rather than a guide. That is a deliberate decision about your time rather than an oversight.
What it will not do. Get your video watched.
Being recognised as a video page affects how the page can be presented in results. It says nothing about whether anybody plays the thing, which is a question for your own analytics rather than for this reporting.
What to do if it flags something. Ask a developer.
Video handling is about how the page is built rather than about content, so it belongs with whoever maintains the site.
The Number That Matters
The figure worth watching is the gap between the pages you have published and the pages Google has stored. Not the excluded total, not the error count. The gap. Above all, whether it is widening.
Why the gap is the useful measure. It is a verdict.
You decided these pages were worth publishing. Google decided how many were worth keeping. The difference is the clearest statement available about how your content is judged.
What a stable gap means. A characteristic.
Every site has one. A steady difference is simply the shape of your site, particularly where a platform generates addresses you never intended to publish.
What a widening gap means. New work is not landing.
Pages published recently are not being kept. That is a content problem rather than a technical one and it is the single most valuable early warning in this report.
What it usually points at. Volume over substance.
A site producing pages faster than it produces anything worth saying. Our material on pruning covers the response, which is generally fewer and better pages.
How to measure it without agonising. Two numbers a quarter.
Pages you have published and pages stored, written down once every three months. That is enough to see a trend and not enough to become a distraction.
Where else to see it. The sitemap comparison.
Submitting a sitemap gives you the same comparison confined to the pages you declared, which is a cleaner version of the measure.
Do Not Chase Zero
No site has everything stored and no site should. Having every address indexed was never the objective. A business working towards a clean report is optimising a number rather than a business.
Why zero is unachievable. Some exclusions are correct.
You will always have redirects, deliberately excluded pages and generated addresses. Removing those from the report would mean removing them from the site, which would be worse.
What to aim at instead. Two things.
The pages that make you money are stored. The gap is not widening. That is the whole objective and it is considerably easier to hold in mind than a tidy report.
Remember the reporting lags. Sometimes badly.
This reporting went roughly a month without updating from mid November 2025, with Google confirming the delay affected reporting rather than crawling, indexing or ranking. Stale figures are not always a site problem.
What that means practically. Do not react to a single reading.
Look at the direction over months rather than the number today, particularly before anybody changes something in response to it.
What a clean report costs. Real money, for nothing.
We have seen businesses pay for work aimed at emptying categories that described their site behaving correctly. That is the version of this report being used against a business rather than for it.
Where to go next. The response, not the report.
Fixing indexing errors covers what to do about the findings that genuinely matter. Everything sits on the Google Search Console guide.
Published
against stored.
Then whether
it is widening.
Most reporting on this quotes the excluded total, which is close to meaningless on its own. The measure worth watching is how many of the pages you publish are being kept, because a widening gap means your recent work is not landing and that is a content finding rather than a technical one.
What we track here:
If somebody has quoted you for fixing four thousand excluded pages, ask which of them you actually wanted stored.
Every guide.
One tool.
Getting set up and verified, using the reports properly, the performance and indexing data, finding what is broken, finding what is being passed over and turning any of it into work worth doing.
