How to Submit a URL to Google: Step by Step

To submit a URL to Google, open Google Search Console for the site, paste the full URL into the search bar at the top, wait for the URL Inspection result and click Request indexing. That queues the page for a crawl. There is no public "add URL" form any more; Google closed it in 2018 and the old address now redirects to Search Console. The request is a hint, each property gets only a small number per day, and Google still decides whether the page is indexed.

Before you start: the page has to be indexable

A request spends part of a small daily allowance, so check the page first. It should:

• return status 200 (not a redirect, not a 404, not a 5xx),
• carry no noindex in a meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header,
• not be disallowed in robots.txt,
• declare a canonical that points to itself, or to nothing.

The indexability checker runs all four checks on a URL in a few seconds. If anything fails, fix it first. A request for a page that redirects only gets the redirect crawled.

Step 1: open URL Inspection

Sign in to Search Console and pick the property that contains the URL. Paste the complete URL, including https:// and the right host, into the inspection bar at the top of every screen. The URL must belong to the property: a URL-prefix property for https://www.yoursite.com/ cannot inspect https://yoursite.com/page, and a Domain property can inspect any of them.

Search Console then reads the URL's current state from Google's index. This takes a few seconds and costs nothing.

Step 2: read the verdict

The top of the result says one of three things:

Verdict	Meaning
URL is on Google	Indexed. Submitting again only helps if the page changed.
URL is on Google, but has issues	Indexed, with an enhancement or experience problem.
URL is not on Google	Not indexed. The Page indexing section says why.

Open the Page indexing section. Last crawl tells you whether Google has fetched the page at all. Crawled as shows the smartphone Googlebot for every site today. User-declared canonical and Google-selected canonical should match; if Google picked a different URL, that other URL is the one in the index and requesting indexing for this one changes nothing. The full field-by-field reading is in the URL Inspection tool guide.

If the reason is "Discovered - currently not indexed", Google knows the URL and has not fetched it yet. A request is the right move. If the reason is "Crawled - currently not indexed", Google already saw the page and passed, and another crawl of the same content rarely ends differently. Change the page before asking again.

Step 3: test the live URL

Click Test live URL. Search Console fetches the page now, with the smartphone Googlebot, and reports whether it is available, whether crawling and indexing are allowed and what canonical it carries. Click View tested page to see the rendered HTML and a screenshot. If your main content is missing from the rendered HTML, a crawl will not help; the page needs a rendering fix.

Step 4: click Request indexing

The button sits in the inspection result. Search Console runs a quick live check and, if the URL passes, shows "Indexing requested". The URL is now in a priority crawl queue.

Three outcomes other than success:

• "Quota exceeded": the property's daily allowance is used up. It resets the next day. Nothing is wrong with the URL.
• "Indexing request rejected" or "indexing issues were detected": the live check found a blocker such as noindex, a robots.txt disallow or an error status. Fix it, test again, request again.
• A spinner that never ends: a Search Console hiccup, usually. Try later.

The daily allowance

Google states that there is a quota for individual URL requests and that asking several times for the same URL does not get it crawled faster. It does not publish the number. People commonly hit the limit after about ten requests per property per day, and that is the figure to plan around.

Two related points:

• Only Owners and Full users of the property see the button. Restricted users can inspect but not request.
• There is no API for the button. The URL Inspection API is read only.

Request indexing limits and quota goes further into what the quota means and does not mean.

When a request is worth it

• A new page that matters commercially, on the day it goes live.
• An indexed page with a meaningful change: a corrected price, a rewritten title, a new section.
• A page you just unblocked, by removing a noindex or a robots.txt rule.
• A page restored after a 404 or a run of server errors.
• The homepage and main section pages of a brand new site.

When it is a waste

• The page is indexed and unchanged.
• The status is "Crawled - currently not indexed" and you changed nothing.
• You requested it yesterday. It is already in the queue.
• You have hundreds of URLs. The arithmetic of ten a day never works.

Why the old add URL page sends you to Search Console

Until July 2018, Google had an anonymous form where anyone could submit any URL. It was abused and it told nobody what happened afterwards. Google replaced it with the Request indexing button inside Search Console, which requires a verified owner and sits next to the report that shows the outcome. Old bookmarks and old articles still point at the form; the redirect is Google's way of saying that the tool moved, not that it disappeared.

Any site other than Google that offers a "URL submission tool" is doing something else: adding your URL to a directory, pinging services Google does not use, or putting the URL into a sitemap on a domain of theirs. None of that is a submission to Google.

Alternatives that do not use the quota

Internal links. Link the new page from your homepage, a category page or another page Googlebot visits often. For most sites this is the single most reliable way to get a new URL crawled, and it has no limit.

Sitemap with a truthful lastmod. Add the URL to your XML sitemap with the date it was published or last changed. Google uses <lastmod> when it is consistently accurate, and re-reads submitted sitemaps on its own schedule. Do not bump the date on pages that did not change; that is how sites teach Google to ignore the field. The details are in lastmod best practices.

Validate fix. If the URL was part of a group with a shared problem, open Indexing > Pages, click the reason and press Validate fix. Google rechecks the whole group over time.

The Indexing API. It takes 200 publish requests per day per Google Cloud project and is officially only for pages with JobPosting or BroadcastEvent structured data. Google says using several accounts to beat the quota is abuse. For a job board, use it. For anything else, know that it is unsupported.

Submitting hundreds of URLs

At some point the question stops being "how do I submit a URL" and becomes "how do I keep a whole sitemap in Google's index". Two parts to that.

First, you need to know which URLs are indexed and which are not, in bulk. The Page indexing report gives totals and samples, and the URL Inspection API gives an exact answer per URL at 2,000 inspections per day per property. Bulk Google index checker compares the methods and includes a script.

Second, you need a submission loop that only spends effort on pages that qualify. TurboIndex runs that loop after a Google sign-in: it reads the sitemaps submitted in Search Console, fetches each new or changed URL with its crawler TurboIndexBot so that a redirect, a 404 or a noindex page is never submitted (details on the bot page), sends the rest to Google within the daily quota, and inspects each URL afterwards so you can see what Google did.

After you submit: how to check

Come back in two or three days and inspect the URL again. Read Last crawl:

• Crawl date after your request, verdict "URL is on Google": done.
• Crawl date after your request, still not on Google: the queue did its job and the page itself is the problem. Look at the reason and work from there.
• No new crawl after a week: check Settings > Crawl stats for host errors, and make sure the page is linked from somewhere Google visits.

For a short list of URLs, the Google index checker runs URL Inspection on them in one go and gives Google's reason for the ones left out, which beats inspecting them one at a time.

What to do next

1. Run the URL through the indexability checker.
2. Inspect it in Search Console and read Last crawl and the canonical fields.
3. Test the live URL and confirm your content is in the rendered HTML.
4. Click Request indexing once.
5. Link the page from an existing, well-crawled page and add it to the sitemap with the right lastmod.
6. Re-inspect in a few days, and act on the reason if it is still not on Google.