7 Best Website Indexing and Diagnostic Tools: What to Use and When

More than 60% of pages on the web are not indexed by Google, according to a Search Engine Journal analysis of indexing rate data from 2022 to 2025. That includes pages teams have actively submitted and still cannot get indexed.

Website indexing tools split into two categories that most articles conflate. Submission tools notify search engines about new or updated URLs. Diagnostic tools find why pages are not being indexed despite submission. Using a submission tool on a crawled-and-rejected page is the single most common reason indexing problems drag on for months.

This article covers both categories, including four submission tools, three diagnostic tools, four root causes, and a five-step sequence for identifying which problem you are actually dealing with. Each tool is matched to the specific cause it surfaces, not listed by feature count.

Two Types of Website Indexing Tools

Confusing these two categories is why most indexing problems drag on longer than they should. Submission tools solve a speed problem. Diagnostic tools solve a cause problem. Picking the wrong one adds work without moving the needle.

If your pages are not indexed because Google has not discovered them yet, a submission tool closes that gap. If Google has discovered the pages and is still not indexing them, no submission tool fixes that. The cause needs diagnosing first.

Submission Tools: How Pages Get Found Faster

These tools exist to close the gap between publishing content and having it discovered by search engines. Standard crawling can take days to weeks. Submission tools shorten that window by notifying engines directly when content changes.

1. Google Search Console

Best for: Requesting indexing for specific URLs, monitoring index coverage, and checking crawl data directly from Google.

Google Search Console is the starting point for every indexing workflow targeting Google. It is the only official channel for submitting pages to Google’s index, since Google has not adopted the IndexNow protocol. The URL Inspection tool lets you check the current indexing status of any page and request a recrawl.

GSC also serves as a surface-level diagnostic tool. The Crawl Stats report shows how frequently Googlebot visits your site, what response codes it receives, and average server response time. That is where submission and diagnostic workflows overlap. The Page Indexing Report shows which pages are indexed, which are excluded, and why.

• Submit and monitor XML sitemaps
• Request indexing for individual URLs via the URL Inspection tool
• Monitor crawl frequency, response codes, and server response time in Crawl Stats
• View Core Web Vitals and mobile usability issues that affect crawlability

Limitation: GSC is limited to Google only. Manual indexing requests are capped and cannot be bulk-submitted through the interface. The URL Inspection API allows up to 2,000 requests per day per property, shared across all tools and team members on the same property.

Pricing: Free.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools

Best for: IndexNow submissions to Bing and partner search engines, and monitoring crawl coverage outside of Google.

Bing Webmaster Tools is the GSC counterpart for the Microsoft search ecosystem. Bing powers Bing.com, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo in part, which means it carries meaningful traffic for B2B, enterprise, and desktop-heavy audiences. It was an early adopter of the IndexNow protocol, making it the most mature IndexNow implementation available.

The URL Submission API lets you submit URLs programmatically whenever content changes, without logging into the interface. For sites where non-Google search is a meaningful share of the strategy, Bing Webmaster Tools is not optional.

• Native IndexNow support for instant URL notification to Bing and IndexNow partners
• Sitemap submission and crawl error monitoring
• URL Submission API for programmatic bulk submissions
• Keyword and backlink data for Bing-specific visibility

Pricing: Free.

3. IndexNow Protocol

Best for: Developers who want direct, code-level control over URL submission to Bing, Yandex, and other participating engines.

IndexNow is the open protocol underpinning most automated indexing tools. A single HTTP POST call notifies all participating search engines simultaneously. Batches of up to 10,000 URLs can be submitted in one request with no rate limits for legitimate use.

The protocol does not include Google, which has not adopted it. For Google, GSC remains the only official submission route. For everything else, IndexNow is the fastest path from publishing to discovery.

Pricing: Free and open-source. Implementation requires development time for custom stacks.

4. IndexPlease

Best for: Automated daily URL monitoring and submission at scale, without manual intervention.

IndexPlease automates the submission workflow that most teams run manually. It scans your site daily for new and unindexed URLs, submits them to Google and Bing automatically, and sends a daily email with indexing progress. It connects to GSC via a service account, giving it ongoing access to Google’s Indexing API.

For teams publishing high volumes of content across multiple sites, the manual GSC workflow does not scale. IndexPlease handles the monitoring and submission layer without requiring a developer to build a custom IndexNow integration. Plans cover 400 to 2,000 URL submissions per day.

• Daily automatic sitemap scanning for new and unindexed URLs
• Automatic submission to Google and Bing without manual triggers
• Bulk indexing for large URL sets in one action
• Auto-indexing across multiple sites from a single dashboard
• Daily email reports on indexing progress

Pricing: Starter at $7/month (billed annually) for 400 pages/day across 3 sites. Growth at $17/month for 1,000 pages/day across 10 sites.

Diagnostic Tools: Finding the Reason Pages Are Not Indexing

Submission tools cannot fix a page that Google has crawled and rejected. Once a page reaches “Crawled, currently not indexed” status, the problem is content quality, a technical configuration issue, or a crawl budget problem. These tools surface which one it is.

5. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Best for: Identifying orphan pages, measuring crawl depth, finding redirect chains, surfacing soft 404s, and auditing noindex directives across the full site.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider crawls your site the same way Googlebot does: following internal links, logging response codes, and flagging directives. Running it with sitemap cross-reference enabled shows exactly which pages exist in the sitemap but receive zero internal links from the rest of the site, a pattern that reliably causes “Discovered, currently not indexed” status.

For crawl budget issues, the Response Codes tab shows every 4xx, 5xx, and 3xx response across the full crawl. The Redirects tab shows chain length. Screaming Frog’s Crawl Analysis compares sitemap contents against internally linked pages and surfaces orphan URLs directly.

Common indexing issues Screaming Frog identifies:

• Orphan pages with no internal links (common cause of “Discovered, currently not indexed”)
• Pages with crawl depth greater than four clicks from the homepage
• Redirect chains longer than two hops consuming crawl budget
• Soft 404s returning 200 status codes instead of proper 404 or 410
• Noindex tags applied by mistake to pages that should be indexed
• Canonical misconfigurations pointing pages away from themselves
• Blocked resources in robots.txt preventing proper rendering

Pricing: Free for up to 500 URLs. Paid at approximately £199/year (roughly $259 USD) for unlimited crawls.

6. Ahrefs Site Audit

Best for: Identifying thin content pages unlikely to pass Google’s indexing threshold, and finding which non-indexed pages have backlinks making them the highest-priority fixes.

Ahrefs Site Audit crawls your site and scores content health across all pages. It flags low word count, duplicate content, templated pages with minimal unique content, and pages where the search intent is already covered by a stronger indexed page.

That last point matters. If a non-indexed page is competing with an indexed page on the same topic, consolidation is the fix, not fresh content or another submission request.

Combined with Ahrefs’ backlink data, the audit identifies which non-indexed pages have external referring domains. Those pages lose authority while they remain unindexed, making them the highest-priority fixes in any indexing remediation.

Common indexing issues Ahrefs Site Audit identifies:

• Pages with word counts too low to meet Google’s current quality threshold
• Duplicate or near-duplicate content across multiple URLs
• Cannibalization: multiple pages targeting the same intent
• Pages with no external backlinks and thin content (consolidation candidates)
• Internal link count per page (reinforces Screaming Frog orphan data)

Pricing: Lite plan starts at $129/month. Site Audit is included across all tiers.

7. Sitebulb

Best for: Bulk indexing status checks using the GSC URL Inspection API, and generating client-ready visual reports with prioritized issue lists.

Sitebulb integrates with the GSC URL Inspection API to pull indexing status, last crawl date, and exclusion reason for hundreds of URLs at once. The GSC interface does not support this natively. It prioritizes pages for inspection based on internal link popularity, so the most-linked pages get checked first.

The Priority Hints system ranks issues by estimated impact. For agencies reporting to clients, the PDF export explains technical issues in plain language rather than raw data tables. Sitebulb’s URL Inspection documentation notes that the 2,000 URL/day API quota is per GSC property and shared across all tools accessing the same property simultaneously.

Pricing: Desktop starts at approximately $159/year. Cloud version (up to 10 million URLs per audit) starts at approximately $220/year.

The 4 Root Causes These Tools Are Built to Find

Understanding what these diagnostic tools are surfacing makes them easier to use correctly. Most persistent indexing problems come down to four causes, each requiring a different fix.

1. Internal Linking Gaps

A page with no internal links pointing to it is invisible to Googlebot, regardless of whether it is in the sitemap. Google discovers pages primarily by following links from pages it already trusts.

A crawl budget case study documented by HigherVisibility analyzed an online vehicle marketplace with over 10 million pages and found that Google ignored 99% of them. Internal linking was the primary diagnosis: many pages had only one internal link. This is the most common cause of “Discovered, currently not indexed” status at scale.

Fix: Add contextual internal links from high-traffic indexed pages covering related topics. Remove orphan pages from the sitemap if they do not merit indexing. Target pages sitting at crawl depth five or greater first.

2. Crawl Budget Waste

When Googlebot spends its allocation on URL parameter variations, expired product pages, faceted navigation duplicates, redirect chains, and soft 404s, the pages that need indexing get visited less frequently or not at all.

Google’s troubleshooting documentation identifies faceted navigation, session identifiers, and soft 404s as the most common crawl budget drains. Search Engine Land’s crawl budget guide notes that 5xx and 429 codes tell Googlebot to come back later, and in crawl budget terms that delay can be weeks.

Fix: Block URL parameter variations via robots.txt or canonical tags. Return proper 404 or 410 status codes on soft 404 pages. Collapse redirect chains to one direct hop.

3. Thin Content

Since Google integrated the helpful content system into its core ranking signal in March 2024, the indexing bar for content quality has risen. Pages are not just ranked lower for thin content. They are excluded from the index entirely.

A 16-million-page indexing study by Indexcheckr found that Google’s combined 2024 efforts removed 45% of low-quality content from search results. Practitioner observations from Marsiglia Digital Studio following the May 2025 indexing purge found that pages with solid internal linking still dropped from the index when the content did not meet quality thresholds. Internal links cannot prop up thin pages anymore.

Fix: Merge low-word-count pages covering the same intent into a single comprehensive page. Redirect consolidated versions. For sites where content production is the gap, Vettted’s content writing service handles production for teams that have diagnosed the problem but lack the capacity to execute.

4. Server Response Problems Googlebot Sees But Users Do Not

A server can respond cleanly for human visitors and intermittently return a 503 during Googlebot’s crawl window when a background process spikes server load. These errors rarely surface in uptime monitors.

Google’s Crawl Stats documentation states that robots.txt fetch failures cause Google to slow or stop crawling entirely. Search Engine Land’s SEO debugging guide notes that 5xx failures tell Googlebot to come back later, and that delay can mean weeks in crawl budget terms.

Fix: Cross-reference GSC Crawl Stats with server logs filtered for Googlebot’s user agent. Spikes in 5xx responses recurring on the same schedule typically point to a background process competing with page-serving requests during crawl windows.

Run This Diagnostic Before You Pick a Tool

Running tools without a sequence produces overlapping data. This is the order that identifies the root cause with the fewest tool calls.

1. Pull the GSC Page Indexing Report. Separate “Discovered, currently not indexed” from “Crawled, currently not indexed.” The first points to causes 1 and 2. The second points to causes 3 and 4.
2. Run URL Inspection on ten to fifteen URLs from each category. Check last crawl date, canonical resolution, and any flagged reasons. If last crawl date on Discovered URLs is more than 60 days ago, crawl budget is the likely cause.
3. Run Screaming Frog with sitemap cross-reference enabled. Check orphan page count, crawl depth for non-indexed URLs, and redirect chain length. Hundreds of orphan pages means internal linking is the primary fix.
4. Check GSC Crawl Stats for response code breakdown and average response time. If 5xx errors exceed 1% of total crawl requests or average response time exceeds 500ms, pull server logs next.
5. Audit content quality on “Crawled, currently not indexed” pages. If word count is below 300, content is largely templated, or intent is already covered by a stronger indexed page, content improvement or consolidation is the fix, not a submission tool.

For teams that want this diagnostic run end to end without managing each tool separately, Vettted’s technical SEO audit covers the full crawl, indexation, internal link, and content signal analysis with a prioritized repair list. The SEO quick wins audit is the faster option for sites that need a rapid read on the highest-impact fixes first.

How the Tools Compare

The Right Tool Starts With the Right Question

The question is not which website indexing tool is best. It is which problem you are actually trying to solve.

For pages that have not yet been discovered, a submission tool closes the gap. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools cover the two major search engines for free. IndexPlease automates the daily monitoring and submission workflow for teams publishing at volume. The IndexNow protocol gives developer teams direct control without a third-party service.

For pages that are being crawled and rejected, no submission tool helps. Screaming Frog surfaces the structural causes: orphan pages, redirect waste, soft 404s, and canonical issues. Ahrefs identifies thin content and cannibalization. Sitebulb pulls bulk index status from the GSC API and prioritizes what to fix first.

Most sites dealing with persistent indexing problems need both categories in sequence: a diagnostic tool to find the cause, a fix to the underlying issue, then a submission tool to notify search engines once the fix is in place. Vettted’s managed SEO services handle the ongoing monitoring layer, running crawl audits monthly, auditing internal links as new content goes live, and flagging quality issues before pages go live rather than diagnosing them six months later.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a website indexing tool and a website crawler?

A website indexing tool submits or monitors URLs to help search engines discover and index content faster. A website crawler (like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb) simulates how a search engine crawls your site and identifies technical issues preventing indexing. Both get called “indexing tools” informally. The distinction matters when choosing which one to use.

Does submitting a URL guarantee it gets indexed?

No. Google’s own Page Indexing documentation states that not every URL on a site should be expected to be indexed. Submission tells Google the URL exists. Whether it gets indexed depends on content quality, technical health, and crawl budget allocation. A page Google has already evaluated and rejected will not be indexed by resubmitting it.

How long does it take for a page to be indexed after submission?

After a submission request in GSC, indexing can take anywhere from a few hours to ten days. High-authority, frequently crawled sites are faster. Sites with content quality issues, crawl budget problems, or recent manual actions take longer. If a page does not index within two weeks of submission, the cause is structural, not a delay.

Should I use IndexNow tools if I am primarily targeting Google?

IndexNow does not include Google. If Google is your primary traffic source, GSC is the only official submission channel. IndexNow tools are still worth using alongside GSC because Bing, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo collectively represent meaningful traffic for most sites, and submission costs nothing.

What is a soft 404 and why does it cause indexing problems?

A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 OK status code but contains no meaningful content: an empty search results page, a category with no items, or a product page showing an out-of-stock message. Google’s crawl troubleshooting documentation flags soft 404s as crawl budget drains because Googlebot allocates crawl time to a URL that returns success but has nothing indexable. The fix is to return a proper 404 or 410 status code on those pages.