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Live index status with Google URL Inspection

Ask Google, live, whether an exact URL is indexed — its last crawl and coverage state — straight from the Pages inspector, using your connected Search Console.

"Is this page actually indexed?" is one of the most common questions on a client call — and one most tools answer with a stale guess. Crawl Cove answers it live, by calling Google's URL Inspection API for the exact URL you're looking at.

Note

What you'll need: Google Search Console connected for the client. See Connecting Search Console. No extra key beyond the GSC OAuth you already set up.

What it tells you

On the Pages / URL inspector, each crawled URL carries an Index status panel. When you request it, Crawl Cove calls Google on demand and returns the live result for that exact URL:

  • Is it indexed? — Google's current verdict.
  • Last crawl — when Googlebot last fetched the page.
  • Coverage state — Google's own coverage description (indexed, excluded, crawled but not indexed, and so on).

Because it's a live call against your connected Search Console property, it reflects what Google believes right now — not what a crawler inferred from a noindex tag or a sitemap. That makes it the definitive answer when a client asks why a page isn't showing up.

Why it runs per URL, on request

Heads up

Google's URL Inspection API is quota-bound — roughly 2,000 inspections per day across your whole account. To respect that limit, Crawl Cove runs the check per URL, on request, rather than firing it for every page in a crawl. You ask for the URLs you care about; the quota lasts.

This is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation to apologise for. Site-wide live inspection would burn the daily quota in a single audit of a mid-sized site. Running it on demand means the quota is there when you need a definitive answer on the handful of pages a client is actually asking about — a striking-distance landing page, a new product URL, a page you just fixed.

Tip

Pair this with the deterministic crawl findings. The crawl tells you a page carries a noindex directive or a bad canonical (instantly, for every page); the live URL Inspection confirms what Google has done with it. Use the cheap deterministic signal to shortlist, then spend an inspection to confirm.

Next

  • Inspecting a URL — the Pages inspector that hosts the index status panel alongside CWV, findings, and query data.
  • Connecting Search Console — the one-time setup that unlocks live index status and impact scoring.

Put this guide into practice

Crawl Cove runs these audits on your machine and tells you exactly what to fix first. See the features or compare the plans.

Download Crawl Cove

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