Why your URLs say "crawl hint only" — and why you should still submit

You paste a batch of URLs, and before you submit, a yellow banner warns you that they're "not officially supported by Google's Indexing API — treated as a crawl hint, may be deprioritized." It's easy to read that as "this won't work," close the tab, and go back to refreshing Search Console. Don't. The banner is us being transparent about a real nuance — not a sign the tool is broken.

What the warning actually means

Google's own documentation says the Indexing API officially supports exactly two content types: JobPosting and BroadcastEvent (live-stream events). For those, Google commits to acting on your notifications quickly. Your blog posts, product pages, docs, and landing pages aren't on that list — so technically they fall under "other content," which Google treats as a crawl hint rather than a guaranteed-supported notification.

"Officially supported" is not "the only thing that works"

This is the part the scary phrasing obscures. The API still accepts your request for any valid URL. It returns HTTP 200, logs a notifyTime, and pings Google's crawler. It does not reject non-JobPosting URLs. The "officially supported" language is about what Google guarantees, not about what physically goes through.

• Officially supported (JobPosting, BroadcastEvent): Google commits to fast crawl + index behavior.
• Everything else: accepted as a strong crawl hint — Google receives it, queues a crawl, but makes no promise about priority or indexing.
• Either way, the request is real and the receipt (notifyTime) is real.

So why submit at all?

• It's still the strongest crawl signal you can send programmatically — stronger than re-pinging a sitemap, stronger than internal links alone.
• In practice, crawl hints for ordinary pages are frequently honored, especially for fresh or recently changed URLs.
• It costs you almost nothing — a few seconds and (at most) one credit per URL — for a real shot at same-day crawling.
• The alternative for unsupported types is the manual Search Console button, which has no API and rate-limits you to a handful of clicks a day.

What a crawl hint gets you (and what it doesn't)

• Gets you: a fast, explicit "please come look at this URL now" delivered straight to Googlebot.
• Gets you: a timestamped record that the request was accepted.
• Doesn't get you: a promise that Google will crawl on any particular schedule.
• Doesn't get you: indexing of a thin, duplicate, or noindexed page — fix those first, no signal overrides them.

The honest play

1. Submit your pages through the Indexing API — yes, even the "other content" ones. The banner is informational, not a stop sign.
2. Confirm the notifyTime in the raw response so you know the hint landed.
3. An hour or two later, check the Status tab to see whether Google acted on it.
4. For pages stuck in "Crawled — not indexed," treat it as a content/quality problem, not an API problem — audit, fix, then resubmit.