How to ask Google to recrawl a page

· Edited by Chris Dolan

To ask Google to recrawl a page, open Google Search Console, inspect the page's address in the URL Inspection tool, and click Request indexing. For many pages at once, submit a sitemap instead. Both are requests, and Google decides when to act on them. Every statement below was checked against Google's own documentation on 9 October 2026.

Two limits apply from the start. You can only ask for pages on a site you manage in Search Console. And asking does not guarantee that the page will be crawled quickly, or that it will appear in search results at all.

Check first whether you need to ask

Google finds changed pages by itself, and its guide to asking for a recrawl sets the expectation: “Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.” If your change is a day old, waiting is a reasonable choice.

Before you ask, look at what Google already has. Inspect the address in Search Console and compare the Last crawl date with the date of your change. If Google has crawled the page since you changed it, a request adds nothing. The same guide notes that a hosted platform such as WordPress or Blogger usually tells search engines about new content for you.

Ask for one page: Request indexing

Google's help page for the URL Inspection tool describes the request in two steps.

  1. Inspect the page's address in Search Console.
  2. Click Request indexing on the result page. Google runs a quick check for obvious indexing errors and, if the page passes, adds it to the indexing queue.

The help page says indexing typically takes about a day but can take much longer, and that a request does not guarantee the page will appear in Google's index. You can follow progress by inspecting the address again.

You must be an owner or a full user of the property to do this. Our guide to setting up Search Console explains the permission levels. The request is refused when the live test finds that the page cannot be indexed, for example because it carries a noindex rule. Fix the block first, then ask.

The daily limit Google does not publish

The same help page says: “There is a daily limit to how many index requests you can submit.” It gives no number, and no other Google page read for this article gives one either. Figures quoted elsewhere are other people's estimates, and they disagree with each other.

Google's advice on using the limit is plain. Its guide to fixing canonicalization issues, updated on 21 August 2026, says of this feature: “since this feature is subject to quotas, reserve it for your most important URLs”. The recrawl guide adds that asking several times for the same address will not get it crawled any faster.

Ask for many pages: a sitemap with honest dates

For more than a few pages, Google points to a sitemap. Its guide to building and submitting a sitemap lists three ways to hand one over: the Sitemaps report in Search Console, the Search Console API, or a Sitemap line in your robots.txt file. It is equally clear about what a sitemap is: “submitting a sitemap is merely a hint”. The same guide says the order of the addresses in the file does not matter, and that a sitemap that grows too large has to be split into smaller ones.

Two details decide whether the hint is useful.

  • The lastmod date has to be true. Google says it uses the lastmod value when it is consistently and verifiably accurate. A date that changes when the page has not changed teaches Google to ignore it.
  • Submitting once is enough. Google's help for the Sitemaps report says: “Google will try to crawl a sitemap as soon as you submit it.” After that it reads the sitemap again on its own schedule, so resubmit only after a large change. Submitting in the report needs owner permission.

What no longer works, or was never meant for this

  • Pinging Google with a sitemap address. Google announced the end of that endpoint on 26 June 2023, and the post now carries a note that the deprecation is complete. Requests to it return a 404 error. The post also explains what Google relies on instead: lastmod, of which it says “we're using it as a signal for scheduling crawls”. An old plugin that still pings does no harm and no good.
  • The Indexing API. Google's quota page says it “can only be used to crawl pages with either JobPosting or BroadcastEvent” markup. It is for job adverts and livestreams, not ordinary pages.
  • IndexNow. The protocol's own FAQ says: “Submitting a URL through IndexNow alerts all participating search engines that content has changed”. Besides the protocol's own shared endpoint, the ones it lists belong to Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep. Google is not among them.

If nothing changes

  • Look for a block. A noindex rule or a robots.txt rule stops the page whatever you request. The technical accessibility section of our audit checklist lists what to look at.
  • Check the sitemap was read. The Sitemaps report shows whether Google could fetch the file. When a fetch fails, Google keeps trying for a few days and then stops.
  • Allow for duplicates. When Google has grouped the page with a near-identical one, the canonicalization guide says it can take up to two weeks after a fix for the grouping to be re-evaluated.
  • Read the date again. Inspect the address a few days later. A newer Last crawl date means the request worked, whatever the search results show that day.

Sources

All eight were read on 9 October 2026.

  1. Ask Google to Recrawl Your Website, Google Search Central, last updated 10 December 2025.
  2. URL Inspection tool, Google Search Console Help.
  3. Fix canonicalization issues, Google Search Central, last updated 21 August 2026.
  4. Build and submit a sitemap, Google Search Central, last updated 8 July 2026.
  5. Sitemaps report, Google Search Console Help.
  6. Sitemaps ping endpoint is going away, Google Search Central Blog, 26 June 2023.
  7. Requesting approval and quota, Google Indexing API documentation, last updated 16 July 2026.
  8. Frequently asked questions, IndexNow.org.