How to fix “Discovered – currently not indexed”
“Discovered – currently not indexed” means Google knows the address exists — from a link or your sitemap — but has not crawled it yet. Unlike Crawled – currently not indexed, Google has not judged the page’s content at all. It has decided the page is not worth fetching yet.
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Why Google postpones the crawl
Google’s own explanation is that it wanted to crawl the page but expected that to overload the site, so it rescheduled. On stores there are three usual causes: the server is slow or errors under load, so Google crawls less; there are far more addresses than Google wants to spend time on — filters, sort orders and parameters multiplying every category; and the page has so few internal links that Google sees little reason to fetch it soon.
A large number of discovered-but-not-crawled pages is a crawl budget signal. Google sets how much it crawls from how fast and stable the server is (crawl capacity) and how much it wants the content (crawl demand). Many thin, near-identical pages lower demand for the whole site, so fixing duplicate product descriptions often helps here too.
Requesting indexing page by page does not solve it. Make the pages easier to reach and worth fetching, and Google’s crawling follows.
What to check
- Server speed and errors: Search Console → Settings → Crawl stats: average response time and the share of server errors. Slow or failing responses make Google crawl less.
- Address bloat: Filter, sort and session parameters and internal search pages that create thousands of near-identical addresses.
- Internal links: Pages linked only from the sitemap, or buried many clicks deep.
- Sitemap quality: Only canonical, indexable, live pages, with accurate lastmod dates.
- Quality across the site: Many thin pages reduce how much Google wants to crawl any of them.
How to fix it
- Speed up server responses and fix server errors: page caching, a better hosting plan, fewer slow plugins.
- Stop crawl waste: keep internal search and sort parameters out of crawling, and canonicalise filter combinations that should not rank. Do not block pages in robots.txt whose canonical or noindex you need Google to see.
- Link the affected pages from categories, related products and guides — the internal linking tool adds links from pages Google already indexes.
- Clean the sitemap: remove redirected, noindex and missing addresses.
- Give it a few weeks of crawling, and track the pages with a Google index checker.
Questions people ask
- Is “Discovered – currently not indexed” an error?
- No, it is a status. A few pages in it is normal on any site; thousands, or a growing count, point to crawl budget or internal linking problems.
- Should I use the Indexing API to force a crawl?
- No. Google’s Indexing API is only for job postings and livestream pages. Using it for products goes against its terms and does not make weak pages indexable.
- How long until Google crawls the pages?
- Once the cause is fixed, usually days to a few weeks; larger sites take longer.