IndexaHow do I get a new site indexed faster?
A new site gets indexed faster when search engines have an easy path to every URL and a reason to believe the domain is worth crawling. Concretely: verify Search Console, publish an accurate sitemap, make sure nothing is orphaned, earn at least one real external link, serve HTML that does not need JavaScript to read, and submit new URLs as you publish them. Expect days for the homepage and weeks for depth — new domains are slow, and that is normal rather than broken.
Last updated 2026-07-28
What should I set up in the first week?
Six things, in this order. None of them are optional, and together they take under an hour.
- 1Verify the site in Google Search Console and in Bing Webmaster Tools. Without this you are debugging blind, and Google’s Indexing API will not accept submissions for a property you have not verified.
- 2Publish a sitemap and submit it in Search Console. Include only canonical, indexable, 200-returning URLs — a sitemap full of redirects and 404s is a negative quality signal.
- 3Check
robots.txtis not blocking anything important, including your CSS and JS. The most expensive launch bug in SEO is shipping the stagingDisallow: /to production. - 4Make sure every page is linked from somewhere. A page reachable only through the sitemap is a page you have implicitly told Google is unimportant.
- 5Set up IndexNow so Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep learn about new pages in minutes. One text file, no account.
- 6Get one real external link. A single link from a page that is already crawled regularly does more for discovery than any amount of submitting.
How long does a brand new site take to get indexed?
There is no published figure, and anyone quoting you a precise one is guessing. Realistically: the homepage of a new domain is often indexed within a few days of a link being found, while deeper pages commonly take several weeks, and a proportion may never be indexed at all.
The variance is enormous, and it is driven almost entirely by two things: whether anything links to the site, and whether the pages look worth crawling. A new domain with one good inbound link and ten substantial pages will usually beat a new domain with no links and two hundred templated ones — often by months.
Why do new sites only get partially indexed?
Because search engines allocate crawling in proportion to demonstrated value, and a new domain has demonstrated none. Google crawls a sample, forms a view of what the rest of the site is probably like, and rations accordingly — which is why partial indexing is the normal outcome rather than a malfunction.
This is the mechanism behind “Discovered — currently not indexed”, which is where most of a new site’s URLs will sit for a while. It is worth reading the full explanation of that status, because the instinctive response — submit everything again, harder — is precisely the one that does not work.
The productive response is to give the sample Google crawls something to be impressed by:
- Launch with fewer, better pages. Ten genuinely substantial pages beat fifty thin ones, and not marginally.
- Make each page structurally different. If your pages differ only by a swapped noun, Google will treat them as one page with variations.
- Put your best page one click from the homepage. Crawl priority follows internal link prominence.
- Do not launch a thousand programmatic pages on a new domain. This is the single most reliable way to get a site classified as low value before it has a chance.
Does submitting URLs actually speed anything up on a new site?
Yes, for the discovery step specifically — and on a new site, discovery genuinely is a bottleneck, because you have few links and little crawl demand. Submitting turns “wait for Google to re-read the sitemap” into “Google knows now”. What it cannot do is make Google want to crawl.
Where each channel helps on a new site:
| Channel | Effect on a new site | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Sitemap in Search Console | Baseline discovery for Google | Re-read on Google’s schedule, not yours |
| IndexNow | Minutes-fast discovery on five engines | Google does not participate |
| Search Console Request Indexing | Useful nudge for your handful of key pages | Roughly 10–12 URLs per day (unpublished) |
| Google Indexing API | Immediate notification | Officially JobPosting/BroadcastEvent only; 200/day |
| One external link | Discovery and a trust signal | Requires someone else to act |
Use all of them, and understand that the last row is the one doing most of the work. See sitemaps vs IndexNow vs manual submission for how they layer.
How do I get a new site into AI answer engines?
Serve real HTML, allow the AI crawlers explicitly in robots.txt, and publish content that answers questions directly. Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so anything rendered client-side is invisible to them regardless of how good it is.
- Server-render or prerender. If your content only appears after a JavaScript bundle runs, assume an answer engine will never see it. This is the single biggest technical factor, and it is binary.
- Name the crawlers in
robots.txt. A crawler obeys only the group matching its own user-agent, so a wildcardAllowdoes not reliably grant access. ListGPTBot,OAI-SearchBot,ClaudeBot,PerplexityBot,Google-Extendedand the rest explicitly. - Answer the question in the first two sentences of every section. Extractive systems quote passages, not pages. A heading that poses a question followed immediately by a direct answer is far more citable than the same information buried in paragraph four.
- Add an
llms.txtsummarising what the site is, in plain language, with links to your substantive pages. - Use structured data that matches the visible page. Schema that claims something the page does not say is worse than no schema.
- Be consistent about what you are. Use the same one-sentence description of your product or site across your homepage, your schema and your
llms.txt, so systems resolve them to one entity.
robots.txt names each AI crawler individually, and the sitemap is pushed over IndexNow on every deploy.What should I do if nothing is indexed after a month?
Work down a fixed ladder rather than guessing, because the causes are ordered by how cheap they are to rule out. Hard technical blockers first, then discovery, then content.
- 1Run URL Inspection on your homepage. If Google does not know the URL at all, you have a discovery problem — check the sitemap was actually submitted and that something links to the site.
- 2Check for a site-wide
noindex, in both the meta tag and theX-Robots-Tagheader. Check the header specifically; it is invisible in the page source. - 3Check
robots.txtfor a leftoverDisallow: /. - 4Check the canonical tag on a few pages — a template hardcoding the homepage as canonical will collapse the whole site into one URL.
- 5Check what Googlebot receives, not what your browser receives, using the rendered HTML in URL Inspection.
- 6If none of the above, the problem is almost certainly perceived value. Get an external link, cut the page count, and deepen what remains.
Once the blockers are gone, the remaining job is repetitive: every time you publish or update a page, tell every engine. Indexa automates that half — it reads your sitemaps daily, submits what changed to Google’s Indexing API and to the IndexNow engines, and runs on your own computer using your own credentials. $19 once, no subscription. It cannot make a page worth indexing; nothing can do that except the page.
Frequently asked questions
Should I submit every URL on a new site immediately?
No. Submit your genuinely important pages and let the sitemap carry the rest. Bulk-submitting hundreds of URLs on a new domain does not increase indexing and spends limited daily quota on pages Google has already decided to postpone.
Does buying an aged domain get me indexed faster?
Sometimes, and it carries real risk: you inherit the domain’s history including any penalties or spam associations. It is not a substitute for the work, and it is an expensive way to skip a queue you can also join legitimately with one good link.
Do I need to be in Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Search Console?
It is worth doing — it is free, and Bing’s index feeds a number of other surfaces. But it is not required for IndexNow submissions, which are authenticated by the key file on your domain rather than by an account.
Stop hand-submitting URLs
Indexa reads your sitemaps every day and submits what changed — to Google’s Indexing API with your own Google Cloud project, and to Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep over IndexNow. It runs on your own computer; your credentials never leave it.
Submitting a URL is not a guarantee that it will be indexed — that decision always rests with each search engine. What a submission tool controls is the notification half: making sure every engine knows about every page the day it is published or changed.