Google Indexing API WordPress Plugins Compared

Five WordPress plugins will send your posts to the Google Indexing API, and four of them submit for free: Rank Math's Instant Indexing for Google, SEOPress, CrawlWP and Fast Index. They all submit the same way, through a Google Cloud service account you set up yourself, and they all share the same default quota of 200 URLs a day. The real difference is what happens after you submit. Only CrawlWP Premium and Instant Indexing & Check read whether the page actually got indexed. The rest show you a receipt.

Every fact below was read from each plugin's wordpress.org listing, its vendor documentation and Google's Indexing API documentation on October 5, 2026. None of these vendors pays us, and we do not sell a WordPress plugin. We sell an indexing and index monitoring tool for sites you own, which works on top of whichever plugin you choose, and this article says plainly where a plugin on its own is enough.

Google Indexing API WordPress plugins compared

Install counts come from wordpress.org and dates are each plugin's last release. Rank Math's plugin is the one most sites already run, which is why most of the questions people ask about this topic are really questions about it.

Which WordPress plugin is best for the Google Indexing API?

For most sites already on SEOPress, the built-in option, because it costs nothing extra and covers Google and IndexNow from the same settings screen. For sites on Rank Math or Yoast that only want a ping on publish, Rank Math's Instant Indexing for Google, which works next to any SEO plugin. For anyone who needs to know what happened after the ping, CrawlWP Premium at $59 a year, since it is the only widely installed plugin that reads index status back into the post list.

Instant Indexing & Check deserves a mention for the same reason. It is small, with a few hundred installs, but its free Google API mode uses your own service account to read Search Console status for your URLs, which is the right data source. Its premium "NO API" mode charges 0.2 credits per check and skips the Google Cloud setup entirely.

If you already have one of the big SEO plugins installed, do not switch SEO plugins just for this. Submission is close to identical across all five. The thing worth paying for is confirmation, and that can come from a plugin or from a tool outside WordPress.

Do you need a Google Cloud JSON key for these plugins?

Yes, for every plugin that calls the Google Indexing API from your site. Rank Math's setup guide lists the steps: create a project in Google Cloud, enable the Indexing API, create a service account, create a JSON key for it, add the service account as an Owner on your Search Console property, then paste the key into the plugin. You repeat the same steps for every additional site.

The Owner step is the one people skip, and it is the cause of most permission errors. Google only accepts Indexing API notifications from an account that owns the property in Search Console, so a service account added as a full user, not an Owner, gets refused.

The exceptions are plugins that relay through their own service. Instant Indexing & Check's premium mode is one. You trade the setup for credits and for sending your URLs through a third party.

What does Get status actually tell you?

Less than it looks. In Rank Math's plugin the Get status button calls the Indexing API's metadata endpoint, and Google's reference documentation is explicit: "The GET request doesn't tell you when Google indexes or removes a URL; it only returns whether you successfully submitted a request." The response holds the URL and the time of your latest update or removal notification. There is no index state in it.

That is why so many reviews of the plugin on wordpress.org complain that Get status shows a 404, "Requested entity was not found", for pages that are plainly in Google. The API has no notification on record for those URLs because they were never sent through it. Rank Math's guide says to publish the URL once from the console and then check again, which turns the 404 into a timestamp and still tells you nothing about indexing.

The real answer lives in a different API. Search Console's URL Inspection reports whether a URL is on Google, its coverage state, the last crawl and the canonical Google picked. Any plugin or tool that claims to confirm indexing should be reading that, not the Indexing API metadata. We compare what each approach shows in our Rank Math Instant Indexing alternative breakdown.

How many URLs a day can a WordPress plugin submit to Google?

200 by default. Google's quota for the Indexing API is 200 publish requests per day per Cloud project, and quota is counted per URL, so batching 100 calls into one HTTP request still uses 100. SEOPress states the 200 figure on its own feature page. Rank Math's changelog shows it adjusted its limits in September 2024 to follow Google's guidance.

On a site that publishes five posts a day this never binds. It binds immediately when you migrate a site, change permalinks or republish an archive. In that case submit the pages that earn money first, keep the sitemap clean so Google can find the rest on its own, and send everything to Bing through IndexNow, which accepts up to 10,000 URLs in one request. Our IndexNow plugin comparison covers that side.

Is the Google Indexing API safe to use on a normal WordPress site?

It is widely used that way, but Google does not endorse it. Its quickstart says the API "can only be used to crawl pages with either JobPosting or BroadcastEvent embedded in a VideoObject," and that all submissions "undergo rigorous spam detection." It adds that abuse, "including the use of multiple accounts or other means to exceed usage quotas, may result in access being revoked." Rank Math's own plugin description carries the Job Posting note and says to proceed with caution.

The sensible reading is that the API is one discovery signal, not a guarantee and not a replacement for a sitemap. Never create extra Cloud projects to get around the 200 limit, because that is exactly the abuse Google names. And do not judge the API by whether the page indexed, because Google decides that after it crawls. Rank Math's FAQ says the same thing.

When a WordPress plugin stops being enough

A plugin fires when you hit publish. That covers new posts. It does nothing for the 2022 guide that quietly dropped out of the index last month, the product category that picked up a stray noindex after a theme update, or the hundred posts sitting in Crawled, currently not indexed. Those are the pages where traffic actually goes missing on a site that has been running for a few years.

That is the job we built Indexing for. It reads the sitemap your SEO plugin already generates, checks every URL at the source for errors, noindex, wrong canonicals and robots.txt blocks, then asks Search Console for the real index state of each one. Pages Google never crawled get submitted through the Indexing API and IndexNow. Pages it crawled and declined get a plain-English reason, because resubmitting them daily changes nothing. For those, the fix is the content itself, and a tool that re-optimizes pages you have already published is a better use of the afternoon than another ping. Our guide to Crawled, currently not indexed goes through the usual causes.

There is no WordPress plugin to install. You add our service account as an Owner in Search Console, which is the same step the plugins ask for, minus the Cloud project and the JSON key. Starter is $29 a month billed yearly for about 2,000 URLs a month with daily monitoring, and Growth at $47 adds hourly monitoring, auto-resubmit and de-index alerts. The full breakdown is on the pricing page, and the WordPress setup is on our WordPress indexing page.

Is SEOPress Google Indexing API free?

Yes. SEOPress includes Google Indexing API submission in its free version, with Google's 200 requests a day, and IndexNow for Bing and Yandex at 10,000 requests a day. You still create your own Google Cloud service account. SEOPress PRO, from $49 a year, is not needed for instant indexing.

Does Yoast SEO support the Google Indexing API?

Not as a built-in feature. Yoast offers IndexNow in Yoast SEO Premium, which pings Bing and the other IndexNow engines, not Google. To call the Google Indexing API on a Yoast site, add a separate plugin such as Rank Math's Instant Indexing for Google, which works with any SEO plugin.

Can I run two Google Indexing API plugins at once?

You can, but it wastes quota. Both plugins would send the same post to the same Cloud project or to two projects, and either way you burn requests on duplicates. Pick one submitter and, if you need confirmation, add something that reads URL Inspection rather than a second submitter.

Related reading: how the Google Indexing API works for site owners and why a WordPress site is not indexed.