Glossary
Plain-English definitions for indexing, crawling, and AI-search terms.
BroadcastEvent schema
Structured data for live event pages — the other officially supported API content type.
BroadcastEvent marks a page as a live or replayable broadcast (stream, sports, concert, conference). Pushing the URL through the Indexing API near the event start time helps Google surface the page in live broadcast carousels.
Canonical URL
The version of a page Google should treat as the single source of truth.
When multiple URLs serve the same or similar content, the rel=canonical link tag tells Google which one to index and pass link equity to. Misconfigured canonicals are one of the most common reasons pages don't rank — auditing your canonical tags before pushing through the Indexing API is essential.
Core Web Vitals
Google's user-experience metrics: LCP, INP, and CLS.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Bad CWV scores correlate with lower ranking and can push pages into Crawled-not-indexed. The Audit tool reports CWV from PageSpeed Insights.
Crawl budget
How many of your URLs Google bothers to fetch in a time window.
Larger or higher-authority sites get more crawl budget. Sites with lots of low-quality URLs waste budget on pages that won't rank. Pushing high-priority URLs through the Indexing API is the active way to direct that budget.
Crawled, currently not indexed
Google fetched your page and decided not to add it to the index.
A Search Console coverage state that means Google has crawled the URL but the quality classifier rejected it. Typical causes: thin content, near-duplicates, low site authority, or cannibalization with stronger pages. Pushing through the Indexing API will not fix this — the page itself needs to change.
Credit
One paid unit of work — one indexer push, one status check, or one audit.
Credits live in your wallet, expire 30 days after purchase, and are spent automatically when your free daily quota is empty. $9.99 buys a 50-credit pack.
Discovered, currently not indexed
Google knows the URL exists but hasn't crawled it yet.
The URL is in Google's crawl queue but hasn't been fetched. This is the case the Indexing API helps with most — pushing the URL moves it up the queue. Common on new sites, low-authority domains, or URLs that haven't earned internal/external links.
Hreflang
Annotations that tell Google which language/region a page targets.
Hreflang tags help Google serve the right locale variant of your page to the right user. Missing self-references and asymmetric annotations are the most common failure modes — see the multi-region playbook.
Indexability audit
A per-URL deep dive: status, canonical, robots, structured data, Core Web Vitals.
The Audit tool in IndexerNow combines URL Inspection, PageSpeed Insights, fetched HTTP status, canonical tag inspection, and structured-data checks into a single report. Run it before pushing or buying backlinks.
Indexing API
Google API that signals a URL is new or updated, prompting a re-crawl.
Google's Indexing API lets you notify Google when a URL is added, removed, or substantially changed. Officially supported for JobPosting and BroadcastEvent content; widely used as a strong 'please crawl' hint for any URL. Hard cap of 200 publish requests per project per 24 hours.
JobPosting schema
Structured data type required for Google for Jobs eligibility.
JobPosting is one of two content types Google officially supports through the Indexing API (the other is BroadcastEvent). Pages with valid JobPosting schema can appear in the Google for Jobs experience and get faster indexing through API pushes.
OAuth
The authorization standard IndexerNow uses to call Google APIs as you.
OAuth 2.0 lets IndexerNow act on your behalf for specific scopes (Search Console read-only + Indexing API). We never see your password and you can revoke access any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
PageSpeed Insights
Google's free tool for analyzing page performance and Core Web Vitals.
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) runs a Lighthouse audit and returns CWV field data when available. The IndexerNow Audit tool calls PSI as part of its full per-URL analysis.
Pre-check
A free pre-batch check that shows Google's current verdict per URL.
Before spending credits on a 50-URL batch, the Pre-check calls URL Inspection on each URL and flags ones already indexed (so you can drop them) or blocked (so you can fix them). Saves credits and surfaces problems early.
Quota
The number of API calls allowed per time window.
Two levels: Google's hard limits (200 indexing publishes per project per day; 2,000 URL inspections per property per day) and IndexerNow's per-user quotas (20 free indexer, 20 free status, 20 free audits per day, plus 150 credit spend per day).
Refresh token
Long-lived credential that lets IndexerNow call Google APIs without re-prompting you.
After you complete OAuth, Google issues a refresh token that we store encrypted at rest. It's tied to your Google account and our OAuth client — it's useless on its own. Deleting your IndexerNow account removes the token.
Request indexing (Search Console)
The 'Request indexing' button in Search Console's URL Inspection.
Same underlying machinery as the Indexing API but manual, one URL at a time, and rate-limited to roughly a dozen requests per day per property. Good for one-offs, painful for bulk work — which is why IndexerNow exists.
Robots meta tag
An HTML tag that tells search engines whether to index a page and follow its links.
The <meta name='robots' content='...'> tag controls per-page indexing behavior. noindex blocks indexing; nofollow blocks link-following. A noindex tag overrides any Indexing API push — Google will accept the notification, crawl the URL, then skip indexing because of the tag.
robots.txt
Site-wide file that allows or disallows crawler access to specific paths.
robots.txt lives at /robots.txt and lists rules per user-agent. Disallowing a URL via robots.txt prevents crawling entirely, which means Google can't read the page's content (or even its robots meta). For 'do not index but do crawl,' use noindex meta instead.
Search Console
Google's free tool for monitoring how your site appears in Google Search.
Google Search Console (GSC) is the source of truth for how Google sees your site. It powers the Indexing API auth flow — IndexerNow can only submit URLs that belong to a property your Google account has verified in GSC.
Sitemap
An XML file listing the URLs you want search engines to know about.
A sitemap.xml exposes your URL inventory in a machine-readable format. Sitemaps are a passive discovery signal — they tell Google what exists, not what changed. Combine sitemap submission with the Indexing API for active push of high-priority URLs.
Soft 404
A page that returns HTTP 200 but looks like a 'not found' to Google.
When Google fetches a URL that returns 200 OK but the page body says 'not found' or has near-empty content, it classifies it as a soft 404 and removes it from the index. Always return a real 404 or 410 status code for missing pages.
URL Inspection API
Google API that returns the current indexed verdict for a URL.
The URL Inspection API is the programmatic equivalent of Search Console's URL Inspection panel. It returns Google's current coverage state, last-crawl time, robots verdict, indexedUrl, and canonical decision for a URL on a verified property. 2,000 calls per day per property, 600 per minute.
URL_UPDATED
The Indexing API notification type for new or changed URLs.
When you push a URL through the Index tool, IndexerNow sends a URL_UPDATED notification to Google's Indexing API. The other type is URL_DELETED, used when a URL has been permanently removed.
Verified property
A site you've proven ownership of in Search Console.
Verification methods include DNS TXT records, HTML file upload, HTML meta tag, and Google Analytics. Only URLs under a verified property can be submitted through the Indexing API.