Google Crawl: How to Get Google to Crawl Your Site, Request a Crawl, and Confirm Googlebot Came

You cannot request your way out of an indexing problem

This is the trap. A page is not showing up, so you request indexing in Search Console. Nothing happens. You request it again. Still nothing. You go looking for a tool that can request harder.

If the page is already in "crawled, currently not indexed", Googlebot has fetched it and the decision has already been made. Requesting another crawl asks Google to make the same judgment on the same page and get a different answer. It will not. The only thing that changes the outcome is changing the page: more unique substance, a clearer purpose, fewer near-identical siblings, and real internal links that signal it matters.

The order that actually gets a site crawled more

Start with the blocks, because a page Googlebot cannot fetch will never be crawled no matter how many times you ask. Check robots.txt, check for a stray noindex, check that the server is not returning 5xx errors or timing out under load. These are the failures that look like crawl problems and are actually configuration problems.

Then build the paths. Every page worth crawling should be linked from a page that already gets crawled regularly, and should sit within a few clicks of the homepage. Put it in a lean sitemap that contains only canonical, indexable URLs. Ping IndexNow so Bing has it immediately.

Only after that does requesting a crawl do anything useful, and even then it is a nudge to move a page up a queue it was already in. Nothing here forces Google's hand, and nothing honestly can. What it does is make sure that when Googlebot arrives, it finds a page worth keeping.

• Remove crawl blocks: robots.txt rules, noindex tags, 5xx errors, slow responses
• Link the page internally from somewhere Google already crawls often
• Keep the sitemap limited to canonical, indexable URLs
• Submit through official channels and ping IndexNow for Bing
• Verify it was crawled and indexed, rather than assuming the request worked

How do you ask Google to crawl your site?

There are three official ways, and it is worth knowing that none of them is a button that summons Googlebot. Submit an XML sitemap in Search Console, use Request Indexing in the URL Inspection tool for individual URLs, and link the page from somewhere Google already crawls often. That is the complete list. Google retired its public Add URL form years ago, so submission is now tied to verified ownership of the property, which is also why no third party can submit a URL on a domain you do not control.

Request Indexing is the one people mean when they say they want to ask Google to crawl a page, and it is deliberately small. The quota sits at roughly ten to twelve URLs per property per day, it is a manual action in the Search Console interface, and there is no API behind it. That makes it useful for a handful of genuinely urgent pages and useless for a catalog. Teams that try to run a migration through it discover the ceiling on day one.

Sitemaps do the volume work instead. A sitemap is not a request so much as an inventory: it tells Google which URLs exist and when they last changed, and Google decides what to do with that. Keeping it accurate matters more than resubmitting it, because a sitemap padded with redirects, noindexed pages and 404s teaches Google to trust it less. For most sites the single highest-leverage crawl action is not a request at all, it is linking the page from a template or hub page that Googlebot already visits daily.

• Submit or resubmit an accurate XML sitemap in Search Console. Best for volume, and the only realistic option past a few dozen URLs.
• Use Request Indexing in URL Inspection for individual high-value URLs. Roughly ten to twelve per property per day, manual only.
• Link the page internally from a page Google crawls often. Free, unlimited, and usually faster than either of the above.
• Fix what is suppressing crawl: server errors, slow responses, and robots.txt rules that block the URLs you want fetched.
• Wait. Google states that it "automatically looks for sites to add to our index" and that it "can take a few weeks for Google to notice a new site".

Can you tell Google to crawl a specific page, and what changes crawl rate?

For one page, yes, through URL Inspection, and that is the honest limit of direct control. Beyond it, crawl rate is something you influence rather than set. Google removed the Crawl Rate Limiter from Search Console in January 2024, so there is no dial left even to slow crawling down deliberately.

What Google does respond to is crawl demand, which it describes in terms of perceived inventory, popularity, and staleness. Pages that are linked to, that change, and that people visit get crawled more. Pages that sit unlinked in a sitemap and never change get crawled rarely, regardless of how many times you resubmit them. This is why crawl problems are usually architecture problems: a page four clicks deep with one internal link is telling Google something about its importance, and the sitemap entry does not outrank that signal.

Server health is the other half, and it works in one direction only. Google states that "5xx and 429 server errors prompt Google's crawlers to temporarily slow down with crawling", and that the reduction is proportionate to how many URLs are erroring. A slow or flaky origin during a crawl push does not just fail those requests, it reduces the crawling of everything else too. And blocking URLs in robots.txt to tidy the crawl queue backfires: Google notes that blocked URLs "will stay part of your crawl queue much longer", because it never gets to fetch them and find out they are gone.