Google Search Console report showing which pages are indexed, excluded, or have errors preventing indexing.
Index Coverage is a diagnostic report in Google Search Console that categorizes every URL Google has discovered on your website into four status buckets: valid (indexed), valid with warnings, excluded, and error. This report serves as your primary window into understanding which pages Google can and cannot find in search results, making it essential for maintaining a healthy, discoverable website.
The report breaks down your site's URLs by their indexing status, providing specific reasons why pages might be excluded or encountering errors. Valid pages appear in search results, while excluded pages are intentionally not indexed (often for legitimate reasons like duplicate content or blocked by robots.txt). Error pages represent technical issues preventing indexation, such as server errors or redirect problems.
Why It Matters for AI SEO
As AI systems increasingly rely on comprehensive content understanding, ensuring your pages are properly indexed becomes even more critical. Google's AI algorithms need access to your content to evaluate its relevance, quality, and context within your topical authority. Pages stuck in error states or improperly excluded miss opportunities to contribute to your site's overall semantic understanding. AI-powered content creation tools often produce large volumes of pages rapidly, making index coverage monitoring essential for programmatic SEO strategies. Without proper indexing, even the most sophisticated AI-generated content remains invisible to search engines and fails to build the topical clusters that modern ranking algorithms prioritize.
How It Works
Access the Index Coverage report through Google Search Console's "Pages" section under "Indexing." The interface displays four main categories with detailed breakdowns of why pages fall into each bucket. Click through specific error types to see affected URLs and implementation guidance. Common error types include server errors (5XX codes), redirect errors, blocked by robots.txt, and soft 404s where pages return successful status codes but contain thin content. For excluded pages, you'll see reasons like "Crawled - currently not indexed" (often indicating content quality issues) or "Discovered - currently not indexed" (typically low-priority pages in large sites). Monitor the report weekly, focusing on unexpected spikes in errors or excluded pages. Use tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to cross-reference findings and identify patterns. Submit sitemaps for important pages stuck in "discovered" status, and address technical errors promptly to maintain crawl budget efficiency.
Common Mistakes
Many practitioners panic over excluded pages without understanding that some exclusions are beneficial—duplicate pages, thin tag pages, and properly blocked administrative pages should remain excluded. Conversely, important pages marked "valid with warnings" often get ignored despite needing attention for issues like missing mobile usability or slow loading speeds that impact rankings.