Does requesting indexing get a new page indexed faster?
The question
When you publish a new page, does asking Google to index it in Google Search Console get it into the index sooner than waiting for Google to find it?
Why I'm testing this
Publish a new page, open Search Console, and there's a "Request indexing" button waiting for you. A lot of SEO advice says to click it. But does it actually do anything you can see?
The signals I've come across don't fully agree. Google's own guidance says a request doesn't guarantee a page will be indexed, or indexed quickly, and that there's a limit on how many you can submit. Plenty of practitioners still treat it as a fast lane. I couldn't point to evidence from a site like mine, so I wasn't sure which to believe.
My hypothesis
A page with an indexing request will be indexed sooner than a comparable page without one. The null outcome is just as plausible: on a new site, the request may make no visible difference. We'll report whichever happens.
The experiment
- Baseline
Before I changed anything, both pages were in the same position: newly published and not yet in Google's index. I confirmed this in URL Inspection at publish time, so neither page started ahead.
- Page A - "How I Read Google Search Console Report: The First 3 Things I Look At"
- Page B - "How I Cross-Check Search Console Against GA4: The 3 Things I Double-Check"
- Discovery routes: both pages in the sitemap, both linked from [the same listing page], and neither linked to the other
- Indexing requests: none submitted for either page at this point, and neither URL shared anywhere else.
- What I changed
One thing only. On 20th September 2026, I submitted an indexing request for [Page A] using the URL Inspection tool in Search Console (paste the URL, then select "Request indexing").
The other page got nothing. It was left to be found naturally through the sitemap and internal links.
Everything else stayed identical across both pages for the whole window. If anything on the site changes during the experiment, it goes in the change log with the date, so it can be ruled in or out later.
- Variables
- Whether an indexing request was submitted: yes for one page, no for the other.
- Primary metric
- Time to index
What I learned
The experiment is running, and the data is still coming in. I'm checking both pages in Search Console on a fixed schedule, and I'll publish the results here once the observation window closes