Crawled vs discovered, currently not indexed: what each status means
These two Search Console statuses look alike and mean different things. Discovered, currently not indexed means Google knows the URL exists but has not fetched it yet. Crawled, currently not indexed means Google did fetch it and decided, for now, not to index it. Neither is an error you can fix with a tag, and neither comes with a reason from Google. What you can do is rule out the mechanical causes, then work on the things that actually move them.
Which one are you looking at?
| Status | What happened | Usually about |
|---|---|---|
| Discovered, currently not indexed | Google found the URL (a link, your sitemap) but has not crawled it | How much Google is willing to crawl on your site right now |
| Crawled, currently not indexed | Google fetched the page and did not add it to the index | What Google made of the page once it saw it |
A new page or a new site sits in Discovered for a while quite normally. It becomes worth attention when it stays there for weeks, or when a whole section of the site is stuck in it.
First, rule out the mechanical causes
Neither status is caused by a noindex or a robots.txt rule: those have their own statuses. But a page can carry several problems at once, and it is worth knowing the page itself is clean before you start rewriting it. The check below reports the HTTP status and redirects, noindex in the meta tag and the HTTP header, the canonical and whether the canonical URL itself loads, and whether robots.txt allows Googlebot.
- Does the page answer 200, directly? A redirect means the destination is the page Google will consider.
- Is the canonical pointing at itself? If it points elsewhere, you have asked Google to index the other URL. See Duplicate without user-selected canonical.
- Is the content in the HTML the server sends? Our checkers read raw HTML without running JavaScript. If the text you care about is missing there but visible in your browser, your page depends on rendering, which makes everything slower and less certain.
- Is the URL in your sitemap, and linked from pages that are already indexed? For Discovered this is the most useful thing you control.
Discovered, currently not indexed: what actually helps
- Link to it from pages that are already indexed. Google describes this status as a crawl it rescheduled, and says there is no need to resubmit the URL. Internal links are one of the few things on this list that are fully in your hands.
- Reduce the number of near-identical URLs. Filter, sort and tracking-parameter URLs compete for the same crawling.
- Check your server is not slow or erroring under crawl. Google reduces crawling on sites that respond slowly; Search Console's Crawl stats report shows average response time and server errors.
- Don't expect Request indexing to change it. Google says there is no need to resubmit URLs in either status. It is a queue, not a guarantee, and it does not address why the crawl was deferred.
Crawled, currently not indexed: what actually helps
Google saw the page and passed. It does not say why, and nobody outside Google can tell you which reason applies. The patterns worth examining honestly:
- Is this page meaningfully different from your other pages? Sets of pages built from the same template with a few words swapped are the commonest case.
- Does it answer something a person would search for? Pages that exist for structure (empty tags, thin archives, paginated duplicates) often sit here, and that may be fine.
- Is it worth indexing at all? For many of these URLs the right answer is to noindex them deliberately, merge them into a stronger page, or leave them alone, rather than to chase the status.
What not to do: repeatedly clicking Request indexing, resubmitting the sitemap, or making cosmetic edits to force a recrawl. None of those addresses why the page was passed over, and Search Console will show the same status afterwards.
How to tell whether anything changed
Use URL Inspection on the specific URL and look at the crawl date, not just the status. If Google has not recrawled since your change, the status cannot have changed yet. Give it weeks rather than days, and change one thing at a time, so you can tell which one worked.
If the page is missing from search but Search Console shows a different reason, start from why a page isn't showing up on Google.
Source: Google Search Console Help: Page indexing report. The two status descriptions and the advice not to resubmit are Google's. Google does not say why an individual page is passed over, and neither can we.