How to Get Your Website Indexed by Google and Bing
- Harold Bell
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Key takeaways
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In more than 16 years of building content programs for enterprise tech brands, the most expensive failure mode I’ve seen isn’t bad content. It’s good content that search engines never filed. Not penalized, not outranked. Just never indexed, sitting in a library no engine ever added to its shelves.
The stakes doubled when AI search arrived. Google’s index feeds classic rankings and AI Overviews. Bing’s index feeds ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot. Two indexes, two quality bars, and a page missing from either one is invisible to that half of the answer economy. This guide covers how indexing works on both engines, how to check what each one actually holds, and how to collapse indexing time from weeks to hours.
What does it mean to get indexed
Indexing is the step where a search engine stores your page in its retrievable database after crawling it. A page that isn’t indexed can’t rank on Google or Bing and can’t be cited by ChatGPT, Copilot, or AI Overviews, no matter how good the content is. |
Search visibility runs through a four stage pipeline. The engine crawls your page, renders it, decides whether to index it, and only then ranks it. Most teams obsess over stage four and assume stages one through three take care of themselves. They don’t. Crawling is not indexing. An engine can visit your page, read every word, and still decline to store it.
Both engines are selective on purpose. Their indexes are curated libraries, not archives of everything that exists, and admission standards have tightened every year as the volume of published content has exploded. If you’re newer to how search engines evaluate content, the mental model that matters here is simple. Ranking is a competition. Indexing is a bouncer.
Why does indexing decide your AI visibility
AI engines answer questions by retrieving from search indexes. ChatGPT search and Copilot retrieve from Bing’s index, and Google’s AI Overviews draw from Google’s. Getting indexed in both engines is the eligibility test for AI citations. |
The AI answer engines didn’t build their own maps of the web. They rent them. Seer Interactive’s citation research found 87% of ChatGPT search citations match Bing’s top organic results, and Copilot runs on the same foundation. On the Google side, AI Overviews assemble answers from pages in Google’s index. Every retrieval starts with a lookup, and pages outside the index never make the candidate pool.
This is why indexing sits upstream of every engine in the Engine Optimization Matrix. Whether you’re optimizing for SEO, AEO, GEO, or LLMO, the work only counts if the page cleared admission first. I’ve watched teams invest in AI search visibility tracking while a third of their library sat outside the index those AI engines retrieve from. Track later. Get indexed first.
How do you check what each engine has indexed
Run a site: search on both engines for a rough count, then use the page indexing report in Google Search Console and Site Explorer in Bing Webmaster Tools for the authoritative page level answer. |
The quick check is typing site:yourdomain.com into Google and into Bing. Treat the counts as directional, because both engines round aggressively, but a big gap between the two engines or between the count and your actual page inventory tells you where to dig.
The real answer lives in the consoles. In Google Search Console, the Pages report under Indexing splits your site into indexed and not indexed, then lists the reason for every exclusion.
In Bing Webmaster Tools, Site Explorer shows the same picture from Bing’s side, and my complete Bing Webmaster Tools guide walks through every report in that dashboard. Check both, because the engines disagree more often than most marketers assume. Separate crawlers, separate quality bars, separate verdicts on the same page.
How do you set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Verify your domain in Google Search Console with a DNS record, submit your XML sitemap, then import everything into Bing Webmaster Tools with one click. Total setup time is under 15 minutes for most sites. |
Google first, because Bing borrows from it. Setting up Google Search Console takes three steps.
Verify ownership. Use the Domain property with a DNS TXT record rather than the URL prefix option. DNS verification covers every subdomain and protocol variant and survives site rebuilds.
Submit your sitemap. Under Indexing, open Sitemaps and submit your XML sitemap URL. Confirm the status reads Success, because a sitemap that won’t parse quietly starves discovery.
Baseline the Pages report. Before you fix anything, screenshot the indexed count and the exclusion reasons. Every recovery effort needs a before picture.
Then Bing, which takes one click. Bing Webmaster Tools offers a direct import that carries your verified GSC properties and sitemaps over, so there’s no second verification project. Turn on IndexNow while you’re in there. It’s the piece of the Bing setup most teams skip and the piece that matters most for speed.
How do you get new pages indexed fast
Publish with internal links already pointing at the new page, confirm it’s in your sitemap, request indexing through URL Inspection in Google Search Console, and push the URL through IndexNow for Bing. Together these compress discovery from weeks to hours. |
Order matters here more than most guides admit, so here’s the sequence I run on every publish.
Ship the internal links first. Links from already indexed pages are the strongest signal that a new page belongs to a coherent library. Publishing a batch of posts that only link to each other creates an orphaned cluster the crawler has no reason to trust. I’ve made that mistake on this site, and the recovery cost far more than the discipline would have. A living internal linking strategy is the cheapest indexing tool you own.
Confirm the sitemap picked it up. Most platforms update the XML sitemap automatically on publish. Verify rather than assume.
Request indexing in Google Search Console. Paste the URL into URL Inspection and hit Request Indexing. This queues a priority crawl, and for a page with real inbound links it usually lands within a day or two.
Push to Bing through IndexNow. IndexNow tells Bing the moment a URL is published or updated, no crawl schedule required, and it runs outside your daily submission quota. My guide to getting pages into Bing’s index covers the full protocol and why it routinely turns indexing into a same day event.
Why do pages get crawled but not indexed
Crawled currently not indexed means the engine saw your page and decided it wasn’t worth storing. It’s a value judgment about redundant intent or weak discovery signals, not a technical error, and the fix is differentiated content plus live inbound links before you request indexing again. |
This is the exclusion that confuses teams most, because nothing is technically broken. The crawler visited, the page rendered, and the engine still passed. In my experience running indexing recovery on this very site, the verdict almost always decodes to one of two sentences. This page says what an already indexed page says, or nothing we trust points at this page.
The fix follows the diagnosis. If the page overlaps an existing page’s intent, differentiate it or consolidate the two, and a gap analysis will show you which intent lanes are genuinely open. If the page is orphaned, build inbound links from indexed pages and let them go live before you touch the request button. Requesting indexing on an unchanged page teaches the engine nothing except that you’re impatient.
What blocks indexing entirely
The hard blockers are noindex tags, robots.txt disallows, canonical tags pointing elsewhere, client side rendering the crawler can’t execute, and server errors that burn crawl budget. Every one of them is visible in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools if you look. |
Beyond the value judgments sit the mechanical blockers, and they’re worth a quarterly sweep. Stray noindex tags survive site migrations. Robots.txt rules written for a staging environment ship to production. Canonical tags point at retired URLs and quietly hand your equity to a page that no longer exists. Duplicate URL variants split one page’s signals across two addresses.
Rendering deserves its own line. If your critical copy loads through client side JavaScript or lives inside embedded widgets, crawlers can index the shell and miss the substance, and Bingbot handles JavaScript less reliably than Googlebot. Native platform text elements beat embeds every time for content you need engines and LLMs to actually read. On this site, every colored callout and answer box is native text for exactly that reason.
How do you keep pages indexed
Indexing isn’t permanent. Pages fall out when they go stale, lose internal links, or get outcompeted for the same intent. A quarterly index audit, scheduled content refreshes, and a living internal link structure keep your library in both engines. |
Deindexing rarely announces itself. A page slips from the index months after publication because the site around it changed, the links pointing at it disappeared in a redesign, or a competitor published something the engine judged more worthy of the same shelf space. Put the Pages report and Site Explorer on a quarterly calendar and compare against your last baseline, because the trend line matters more than any single snapshot.
And remember what indexing buys you. Admission, not placement. Once a page is in, the ranking rules take over, and they differ meaningfully by engine. For Google, that’s the comprehensiveness and authority game covered in my guide to enterprise SEO strategy. For Microsoft’s ecosystem, it’s the more literal playbook in my guide to Bing SEO. Different engines, different physics, same prerequisite.
Want to know what Google and Bing actually hold of your site? An index coverage audit across both engines is the first step of every visibility program my team runs, and the gaps we find usually surprise people. Book 30 minutes with MQL Magnet and we’ll pull the reports together. |
Frequently asked questions
How do I get my website indexed by Google?
Verify your site in Google Search Console, submit an XML sitemap, publish pages with internal links from already indexed pages, and request indexing through URL Inspection. Pages with real inbound links typically index within days.
How long does it take Google to index a new website?
Anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for a brand new domain. Established sites with healthy crawl activity see new pages indexed in hours to days, especially when internal links and an indexing request accompany the publish.
How do I get indexed by Bing?
Import your verified properties from Google Search Console into Bing Webmaster Tools with one click, submit your sitemap, and enable IndexNow so new URLs push to Bing the moment they publish. Bing maintains its own index, so Google indexation does not carry over.
Do I need both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools?
Yes. Google’s index feeds Google rankings and AI Overviews, while Bing’s index feeds ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot. Each console is the only direct interface to its engine, and both are free.
Why is my page crawled but currently not indexed?
The engine reviewed your page and judged it redundant to something already indexed, or found too few trusted signals pointing at it. Differentiate the content, build internal links from indexed pages, then request indexing again.
Does submitting a sitemap guarantee indexing?
No. A sitemap is a suggestion list, not a command. It helps engines discover URLs, but each page still has to clear the engine’s quality and uniqueness bar on its own.
How do I request indexing in Google Search Console?
Open URL Inspection, paste the full URL, and click Request Indexing after the inspection completes. Use it for priority pages rather than bulk submissions, and make sure the page changed since the last rejection.
Does indexing affect ChatGPT and AI search visibility?
Directly. ChatGPT search and Copilot retrieve from Bing’s index and AI Overviews retrieve from Google’s, so a page missing from an index is ineligible for that engine’s citations regardless of content quality.
How many of my pages should be indexed?
Every page you’d want a buyer to land on, and almost nothing else. Tag archives, thin variants, and utility pages diluting your indexed set can drag the engine’s perception of overall site quality.
Can I speed up indexing without paid tools?
Yes. Internal links from indexed pages, a clean sitemap, indexing requests in Google Search Console, and IndexNow for Bing are all free, and together they cover everything paid indexing services claim to do.
Why did my page disappear from the index?
Common causes are lost internal links after a redesign, content that went stale against fresher competitors, accidental noindex or canonical changes, and consolidation by the engine when two of your pages target the same intent.
Does updating old content help it get indexed or stay indexed?
Yes, when the update is substantive. Refreshed data, expanded answers, and new inbound links signal the page earns its shelf space. Cosmetic date changes without real revision do nothing.
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