New research of over 16 million webpages shows that Google indexing rates have improved but that many pages in the dataset were not indexed and over 20% of the pages were eventually deindexed. The findings may be representative of trends and challenges that are specific to sites that are concerned about SEO and indexing.
Research By IndexCheckr Tool
IndexCheckr is a Google indexing tracking tool that enables subscribers to be alerted to when content is indexed, monitor currently indexed pages and to monitor the indexing status of external pages that are hosting backlinks to subscriber web pages.
The research may not statistically correlate to Internet-wide Google indexing trends but it may have a close-enough correlation to sites whose owners are concerned with indexing and backlink monitoring, enough to subscribe to a tool to monitor those trends.
About Indexing
In web indexing, search engines crawl the internet, filter content (such as removing duplicates or low-quality pages), and store the remaining pages in a structured database called a Search Index. This search index is stored on a distributed file system. Google originally used the Google File System (GFS) but later upgraded to Colossus, which is optimized for handling massive amounts of search data across thousands of servers.
Indexing Success Rates
The research shows that most pages in their dataset were not indexed but that indexing rates have improved from 2022 to 2025. Most pages that Google indexed are indexed within six months.
- Most pages in the dataset were not indexed (61.94%).
- Indexing rates have improved from 2022 to 2025.
- Google indexes most pages that do get indexed within six months (93.2%).
Deindexing Trends
The indexing trends are very interesting, especially about how fast Google is at deindexing pages. Of all the indexed pages in the entire dataset, 13.7% of them are deindexed within three months after indexing. The overall rate of deindexing is 21.29%. A sunnier way of interpreting that data is that 78.71% remained firmly indexed by Google.
Deindexing is generally related to Google quality factors but it could also reflect website publishers and SEOs who purposely request web page deindexing through noindex directives like the Meta Robots element.
Here is the time-based cumulative percentages of deindexing:
- 1.97% of the indexed pages are deindexed within 7 days.
- 7.97% are deindexed within 30 days.
- 13.70% deindexed within 90 days
- 21.29% deindexed after 90 days.
The research paper that I was provided offers this observation:
“This timeline highlights the importance of early monitoring and optimization to address potential issues that could lead to deindexing. Beyond three months, the risk of deindexing diminishes but persists, making periodic audits essential for long-term content visibility.”
Impact Of Indexing Services
The next part of the research highlights the effectiveness of tools designed to increase the web page indexing. They found that URLs submitted to indexing tools had a low 29.37% success rate. That means that 70.63% of submitted web pages remained unindexed, possibly highlighting limitations in manual submission strategies.
High Percentage Of Pages Not Indexed
Less than 1% of the tracked websites were entirely unindexed. The majority of unindexed URLs were from websites that were indexed by Google. 37.08% of all the tracked pages were fully indexed.
These numbers may not reflect the state of the Internet because the data is pulled from a set of sites that are subscribers to an indexing tool. That slants the data being measured and makes it different from what the state of the entire Internet may be.
Google Indexing Has Improved Since 2022
Although there are some grim statistics in the data a bright spot is that there’s been a steady increase in indexing rates from 2022 to 2025, suggesting that Google’s ability to process and include pages may have improved.
According to IndexCheckr:
“The data from 2022 to 2025 shows a steady increase in Google’s indexing rate, suggesting that the search engine may be catching up after previously reported indexing struggles.”
Summary Of Findings
Complete deindexing at a website-level are rare for this dataset. Google’s indexing speed varies and more than half of the web pages in this dataset struggles to get indexed, possibly related to site quality.
What kinds of site quality issues would impact indexing? In my opinion, some of what is causing this could include commercial product pages with content that’s bulked up for the purposes of feeding the bot. I’ve reviewed a few ecommerce sites doing that who either struggled to get indexed or to rank. Google’s organic search results (SERPs) for ecommerce are increasingly precise. Those kinds of SERPs don’t make sense when reviewed through the lens of SEO and that’s because strategies based on feeding the bot entities, keywords and topical maps tend to result in search engine first websites and that’s not going to affect the ranking factors that really count that are related to how users may react to content.
Read the indexing study at IndexCheckr.com:
Google Indexing Study: Insights from 16 Million Pages
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