Qaurus is a Canadian go-to-market agency, and qaurus.co is a domain we rebuilt from scratch in 2026. That made it a usable test subject: no backlink history, no accumulated authority, nothing to confound the measurement. We tracked all 95 URLs through Google's URL Inspection API between 6 August and 12 September 2026 and recorded the state of every one.
Most writing about Request Indexing is advice. This is the log.
How long does Request Indexing take to work?
Four days for discovery, then roughly three weeks before pages start being indexed, and most never made it. On our domain the split was stark:
| Date | URLs | Indexed | Discovered, not indexed | Unknown to Google |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 Aug | 77 | 7 | 0 | 70 |
| 20 Aug | 81 | 7 | 0 | 74 |
| 24 Aug | 81 | 9 | 65 | 7 |
| 30 Aug | 83 | 9 | 60 | 14 |
| 31 Aug | 83 | 9 | 54 | 20 |
| 7 Sep | 91 | 16 | 52 | 23 |
| 12 Sep | 95 | 15* | 60 | 19 |
<small>*One URL returned an API error on 12 Sep rather than a status, see the last section. The true figure is 15 confirmed plus 1 unmeasured.</small>
Why did nothing happen for the first two weeks?
Because discovery arrived as a step change, not a ramp. Between 6 and 20 August, fourteen days, the numbers did not move at all: 7 indexed, 0 discovered, and the unknown count actually rose from 70 to 74 as we published new pages.
Then between 20 and 24 August, 65 URLs moved from "unknown" to "Discovered" in four days.
If we had judged the programme on the 20 August reading we would have concluded it had failed. It had not. It had not started yet. The practical lesson is that a two-week checkpoint on a new domain measures nothing, and we had one scheduled.
Does being discovered mean you will be indexed?
No, and this is the finding that changed how we work. "Discovered, currently not indexed" means Google knows the URL exists and has chosen not to spend crawl budget on it.
Sixty URLs were still sitting in that state on 12 September, some for over three weeks. Across the whole period, indexed pages went from 7 to 15. Discovery moved 65 URLs in four days; indexing moved 8 in five weeks.
Re-submitting a URL that is already "Discovered" does nothing. Google is not missing it. It has looked at the queue and deprioritised it. That is a question about the site's authority, not its submission history, and on a domain with no referring domains, authority is the binding constraint.
Did Google reject any pages on quality?
Not one, in five weeks. Across every sweep, zero URLs ever returned Crawled, currently not indexed, the state that means Google fetched a page and declined to index it.
This distinction is worth knowing because the two states are commonly conflated:
| State | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
URL is unknown to Google | No record of the URL at all | Improve discovery: links, sitemap |
Discovered, currently not indexed | Known, deprioritised for crawl | Earn authority; resubmitting is wasted |
Crawled, currently not indexed | Fetched and declined | Fix the page |
We never reached the third row. Nothing was rejected, it simply was not looked at.
Do URLs ever move backwards?
Yes, and more often than we expected. Between 7 and 12 September, five days, 16 URLs changed state: 12 forward and 4 backwards, from "Discovered" to "unknown to Google":
/digital-marketing/guelph/digital-marketing/mississauga/work/custom-jewelry-ecommerce- one insight post
Nothing about those pages changed. They were not edited, redirected or deindexed. The state simply reverted. Any single reading of indexation status is noisier than it appears, and a week-over-week drop is not automatically a problem to solve.
The measurement trap that nearly fooled us
Our 12 September sweep showed indexed pages falling from 16 to 15. A drop in indexed pages is the kind of number that starts an incident.
It was not real. One URL returned HTTP 500 from Google's URL Inspection API, not from our site. We checked the page directly: it returns HTTP 200, twice. The API failed to report a status for that URL, and our tooling counted the absence as a non-indexed page.
An API error and a de-indexing look identical in a summary count. We now treat error rows as unmeasured rather than as zeros.
What we would do differently
- Do not schedule a two-week checkpoint on a new domain. Ours measured a period in which nothing had begun. Four to six weeks is the earliest honest read.
- Track states, not a count. "9 indexed" hides that 65 URLs moved that week.
- Stop resubmitting anything marked "Discovered." It is not a discovery problem.
- Separate errors from zeros in any indexation report.
- Spend the effort on authority instead. Discovery was solved in four days. Indexing was not, and no amount of submission changed that.
FAQ
How many URLs can you submit for indexing per day? Request Indexing in the Search Console UI allows roughly 10, 12 URLs a day before returning "Quota exceeded"; the quota resets on a rolling basis. The URL Inspection API, which we used for measurement rather than submission, allows 2,000 inspections a day and 600 a minute.
Can the Indexing API be used instead, to go faster?
Not for most pages. Google documents the Indexing API as supported only for pages carrying
JobPosting or BroadcastEvent structured data. Service pages, blog posts and landing pages fall
outside that, and requests for them may simply be ignored.
How often should you re-check indexation status? Weekly at most. Sixteen of our URLs changed state in a single five-day window, four of them backwards, so daily readings mostly measure noise. We settled on checkpoints at 2, 7 and 14 days after any submission batch.
Does any of this make a page rank? No. Everything here concerns whether Google has the page in its index at all. Ranking is a separate question, and on a domain with no referring domains it is the harder one.
Method and limitations
Every figure comes from Google's Search Console URL Inspection API against the sc-domain:qaurus.co
property, logged automatically to gsc_index_ops.jsonl at the time of each sweep. Sweeps ran on
6, 20, 24, 30, 31 August and 7, 12 September 2026. The URL count grows from 77 to 95 across the
period because we continued publishing.
This is one domain. A new site with no referring domains is the clearest case for isolating discovery from authority, and it is also the least generalisable. A domain with existing authority would likely convert "Discovered" to "Indexed" far faster, and we cannot say how much faster from this data. We have not run the counterfactual, we do not know what these 95 URLs would have done with no submissions at all.
One correction, recorded rather than quietly fixed. Our own internal notes claimed a "Day-1 72-hour checkpoint" on 20 August where 6 of 10 submitted URLs had moved to "Discovered". The logged API data for that date shows all six still "unknown to Google," and 0 URLs in any Discovered state across all 81. The direction was right; the date was wrong by four days and the precision was never in the data. We found it while assembling this study, which is an argument for assembling studies.
The raw data
Every sweep in this study is committed alongside the code that produced it, including the per-URL tables and the automated queue that now enforces the rules above. If you want the same measurement on your own domain, Google's URL Inspection API is free and allows 2,000 inspections a day, the only real cost is remembering to log each sweep rather than reading the number once and moving on.
We run this on qaurus.co continuously. If you would like us to run it on yours, you can get in touch.
