Glossary
Indexing
Definition
A search engine storing a crawled page so it can appear in results. Crawled does not mean indexed, and only indexed pages can rank or be cited; a page the index skipped is invisible regardless of its quality.
Indexing is where quiet failures live. A site can look finished and be largely absent from the index because of blocked crawlers, broken canonicals, thin duplicated pages, or never being submitted at all. The owner rarely knows, because the site works fine when they visit it.
The check is direct: search engines report what they hold, and a scoped site search approximates it in seconds. It is among the first things our audit verifies, along with whether the crawlers feeding AI assistants can get in at all.
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