Index coverage

What this check looks at

Index coverage is one of the Technical SEO checks. Whether engines can crawl and index the site at all. It is judged from what your site served at the time of the crawl, and a page we could not reach is reported as unreachable rather than skipped.

Why this one needs a Google connection

The answer lives in your Google account, not on your website. Search Console holds the impression and position data, and a Business Profile holds the local data. No amount of crawling recovers either.

Until you connect the account, this check reports a gap naming exactly what is missing. It does not guess, and it does not quietly report a pass it did not earn.

What you get from it

• Connect Search Console to turn the ranking and impression checks on
• Connect a Business Profile to turn the local checks on
• Everything crawl based still runs without any connection, which is most of the catalogue
• We ask for read only scopes, and the connection can be revoked from your Google account at any time without breaking the rest of the audit

What it reports when it fails

These are the findings this check can raise, taken from the code that raises them rather than rewritten for the website. An ellipsis stands where the report fills in what it measured on your page.

• noteSearch Console is connected but returned no index status
• worth fixingGoogle chose a different canonical: it indexes … where the
• worth fixingGoogle is not indexing this page: …
• noteGoogle indexes all … page(s) it was asked about

What would have to happen for this to run

The blocker here is access, not engineering. Once the account is connected the check has everything it needs, because the data already exists and simply is not ours to read.

1. You connect the Google account that owns the property, using read only scopes
2. We pull the impression, click and position rows for the pages we crawled
3. The check compares those rows against the pages, and reports where the two disagree

Where it sits in the audit

See every technical check or the full catalogue of 77 checks. The documentation covers the order checks run in and how a finding is fingerprinted, and the about page explains why we publish the checks that do not run.