Indexability
Definition: Indexability is whether a search engine is allowed and able to add a page to its index, which depends on crawl access, status codes, robots rules, canonical signals and whether the content can be rendered.
Also called: indexable page, index eligibility
Updated
The gates a page has to pass
Think of indexability as a series of gates. A page that fails any one of them stays out of the index, however good it is.
- Crawl access. robots.txt does not disallow the URL, and the server or firewall does not block the crawler.
- Status code. The page returns 200. Redirects pass the job to their target; 4xx and 5xx responses are dropped, and an error page that returns 200 is often treated as a soft 404.
- Robots rules. No
noindexin a meta robots tag or anX-Robots-Tagheader. - Canonical signals. The canonical tag points to the page itself, or Google agrees that this URL is the main version.
- Rendering. The main content is present in the HTML, or renders reliably with JavaScript.
Indexable is not the same as indexed
Passing every gate makes a page eligible. Whether it is indexed is Google’s decision, and it does not index everything it crawls. Google says the Page indexing report in Search Console lists the reason for each URL it has not indexed, such as “Crawled - currently not indexed” or “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” (Page indexing report).
The first kind of reason is usually about quality or duplication; the second is a canonical conflict you can often fix directly.
How to check a page
- Use URL Inspection in Search Console to see the live status, the canonical Google selected and the rendered HTML.
- Check robots.txt, the status code, meta robots and the canonical tag together, since they interact.
- For AI search, remember that most AI crawlers do not render JavaScript, so a page can be indexable for Google and still unreadable for them.
The website audit runs these checks across a sample of pages, and the canonical checker isolates canonical conflicts.