TECHNICAL · SEO GLOSSARY

Index Coverage

The count and status of pages Google has discovered, crawled, and indexed from a site — tracked in Google Search Console.

Definition

Index coverage refers to how many pages on a site have been successfully crawled, evaluated, and included in Google's search index. Google Search Console's Index Coverage (now "Indexing") report shows pages broken into status categories: indexed, crawled but not indexed, discovered but not crawled, excluded (by noindex, canonical, or robots.txt), and errored (404, server errors). The goal is maximizing the ratio of important pages that are indexed relative to the total submitted.

Why it matters for SEO

A page that isn't indexed can't rank. Index coverage problems are often systemic — a misconfigured robots.txt, a site-wide noindex tag left in from staging, or a canonical pointing to a page that redirects can silently exclude dozens or hundreds of pages from Google's index. Monitoring index coverage over time also reveals whether new content is being discovered and indexed promptly, or sitting unindexed for weeks.

How DeepSEOAnalysis checks this

The DeepSEOAnalysis audit detects on-site factors that affect index coverage: pages with noindex directives, pages blocked by robots.txt, pages with canonical tags pointing to non-200 URLs, and redirect chains that may prevent indexing of the final destination. For authoritative index coverage counts, Google Search Console is the source of truth — our audit identifies why pages might be excluded rather than reporting what Google has actually indexed.