EngineeringScoreGoogle Search Console
Our scan reads the indexing directives your page publishes. Search Console is where Google says what it actually did with them.
Why our report names it
Our indexable check reads three sources, every robots meta tag on the page, the X-Robots-Tag header, and whether robots.txt disallows this URL, and lets the most restrictive one decide. All three are instructions you gave. Whether Google took them, dropped the page for a reason none of them mentions, or settled on a canonical you did not nominate, is a question with exactly one authority, and our report answers it by naming Google Search Console.
What it doesn't do
- It answers for Google and nothing else. Bing, DuckDuckGo and every answer engine now quoting your content hold their own view of your site and their own reasons for dropping a page, and none of that surfaces here.
- The indexed view is a record, not a probe. Google's documentation says the results come from the most recently indexed version rather than the page as it stands, and that a URL reported as on Google is eligible to appear in results rather than guaranteed to.
- Ownership has to be proven before any of it opens, and it only ever answers for addresses inside the property you verified. Google documents a daily ceiling on inspection requests per property too, so this is not the tool to point at a long list of URLs.
- Nothing here fixes anything. Search Console will tell you a page is excluded by a noindex directive. Working out which template emits it, and which deploy started emitting it, remains entirely yours.
What it does
- The URL Inspection tool answers for a single address: whether it is on Google, which canonical Google chose, whether the page fetch succeeded, and a screenshot of what Google's inspection crawler rendered. Beside that sits a live test of whether the version on the web now could be indexed.
- Google pairs a site-wide indexing report, listing pages that error, warn or are excluded from Search, with a Manual Actions report. A penalty applied by a person at Google is the one cause of vanished traffic that no crawler of ours could ever infer from your markup.
- The performance side is the half no scanner produces: which queries put your pages in front of people, and the clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position underneath, split by page, country, device and search appearance.
More on the problem
Nothing here is gated behind us. Go straight to Google Search Console and make your own mind up.
Sources
Every claim about Google Search Console on this page was read on from the pages below. Products change and this page does not change with them, so treat the date as the claim's expiry rather than its publication.
- Google's own guide to using Search Console: what the index coverage, Manual Actions, URL Inspection and Search performance reports each cover, and that site ownership must be verified before any of them open
- The URL Inspection tool help page: that indexed results come from the most recently indexed version rather than the live page, that a URL reported as on Google is eligible rather than guaranteed to appear, that the address must sit in the currently opened property, and that inspection requests carry a daily per-property limit
- The Search performance report help page: the clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position metrics, and the query, page, country, device and search appearance groupings
Ready to see where you stand?
Scan your site and get your Engineering Score with a prioritized roadmap in under a minute, no signup required.