Read it, then pass the check at the end to open step 2.
Early game: what Google actually does with a page before it indexes it
Updated
Here is how to get google to index your site, in one sentence: Google indexes a page when it can fetch it, reads one canonical for it, and reaches it through links from pages it already crawls, and the only reliable way to find which of those three is failing is to read every sitemap URL through the Search Console API, one call per URL, and repair what comes back before you click Request Indexing. This workshop is that sentence as six steps, with the numbers from my two sites and their dates.
Before you start
What you need
| Tool or account | Version | Why this workshop needs it | Free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search Console, owner or full access to your property | current | every read and every request | yes |
| A Google Cloud service account added as a user on that property | current | the API calls in step 2 | yes |
| curl | any | the live checks in step 3 | yes |
| Bun or Node | Bun 1.2 or later | to run the read script in step 2 | yes |
Get it on your machine
brew install oven-sh/bun/bun && bun --versionpowershell -c "irm bun.sh/install.ps1 | iex"; bun --versioncurl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash && ~/.bun/bin/bun --versionExpected: 1.2.x or later.
Known gotchas
On Linux ~/.bun/bin is not on PATH until you open a new shell; on Windows the PowerShell execution policy can refuse the installer, so run it from an elevated prompt; on macOS the first curl may prompt for the Xcode command line tools.
The four stages
Google fetches the page. Then it renders it, running whatever script the page needs to show its text. Then it picks one canonical, the address it will treat as the page’s real one. Then, if it chooses to, it indexes. seo-kreativ’s guide is the clearest technical framing I found of crawling as a separate stage from indexing, and I agree with the split; where it stops is at diagnosis, which is where a workshop has to start. Conductor’s guide reports the same stages and adds that a page Google cannot reach through links is a page it may never fetch, which is the stage most of my stuck pages were failing at.
Check your own first stage now. On 2026-10-14 I fetched clevrstart’s home page as Googlebot and as a browser: identical HTML, status 200, the text server-rendered, 2,398 words on the English home page and 2,609 on the French one, no x-robots noindex header. If your page passes that, the fetch and render stages are not your problem, and the dashboard, which cannot tell you which stage failed, is not your tool.
Check what you read in “Early game: what Google actually does with a page before it indexes it”
Three questions drawn from a larger pool, so no two papers are quite the same. Two right passes it and opens the next step. The questions are public; scoring them needs an account, and the key never leaves the server.
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