Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google.
And in this video I'll talk about Search Console's URL Inspection tool,
which provides information about Google's indexed and live versions
of a specific page on your site.
This is one of the most important debugging tools to help you understand
why your page might not be appearing the way you expect in Search results.
By the end of this video, you should be able to find out
the current index status of your pages,
test a live URL, ask Google to crawl a specific page,
and view detailed information about the page's loaded resources,
and other information.
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You can access this tool from the top bar, from the
or anywhere you see a little magnifying glass
next to a URL in a table.
Paste the full URL you want to check
into the Inspect search box in Search Console, and press
To use the URL Inspection tool,
the URL you're inspecting must be in the current property.
Note that this tool can only be used for web pages
and will only show results for web search.
Once the page displays the results, you will see three different sections,
all of them presenting information from Google's last crawl or crawl attempt,
not from a live test of the page.
In the Presence on Google card, you'll get a verdict on whether or not
the URL can appear in Google Search results.
For example, your URL can return a response
that the
Or you might learn that the
which means the URL has been indexed and can appear in Google Search results,
but there might be issues with structured data in the page.
In the
such as a sitemap or a referring page,
when was the last crawl, and by which user agent,
and whether the page is included in the Google web index,
or maybe another version of it
was chosen as the canonical for the Google index.
For example, here you might discover
that the specific page is currently submitted in your sitemap
but marked as no index.
Or that there is a server error on your site
and Google couldn't reach a number of pages.
In the
along with AMP and mobile usability warnings and errors.
For example, if your page is not marked up properly
with structured data, the inspection will return an error
detailing the missing or wrong values.
You can learn more about each of the sections
in the Search Console Help Center.
Once you get the current page status,
you will have three main actions to perform.
First, you can click
to see if the page can be indexed by Google.
This runs a test against the live page
for information similar to the indexed URL.
This is very useful to test live if an issue still exists
even after you fixed it in your site.
If you want to see a live rendered version of your page by Google,
this is the only place you'll find it.
This test confirms whether Googlebot can access your page for indexing.
However, even if a live test is positive,
your page must still fulfil other conditions
in order to be indexed,
such as following the Webmaster Guidelines.
Second, you can click
if you make changes to it.
For example, if you fixed a structured data error,
enhanced your mobile usability, or performed a major change in the page,
you might want to request indexing.
And third, you can view more information about the tested page
by clicking
This will show the retrieved HTML, and more info about the HTTP response,
and page resources loaded.
Wow, that really is interesting!
I hope now you understand how to inspect a URL to get information
about Google's indexed version of a specific page on your site.
That might come really handy
when analyzing your Search efforts on Google.
In the next episode, I'll talk about how to monitor your Search appearance,
where to find errors in your structured data,
and how to ask Google to validate fixes you've done to your site.
Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Webmasters YouTube channel
where we'll be publishing lots of Search Console videos.
Stay tuned.
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