Guide
How to get Google to recrawl your site
Re-indexing is a different problem from first-time indexing: the page is already known, so discovery is not the bottleneck. What you are competing for is crawl budget and Google's judgement about how often your page is worth re-reading.
What actually triggers a recrawl
Honest ranking: only the first three do anything on a timescale you will notice, and none of them is a guarantee.
| Route | Effort | Typical delay | Use when |
|---|---|---|---|
| URL Inspection → Request Indexing | One click per URL | Hours to days | A single important page changed |
Update lastmod in your sitemap |
Automatic if generated | Days | Bulk changes across many pages |
| Indexing API (URL_UPDATED) | Service-account setup | Minutes to hours | Automated re-submission at volume |
| Add internal links to the page | Editorial work | Ongoing | The page is genuinely under-linked |
| IndexNow | One key file | Minutes | Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver — not Google |
Common questions
Related: indexing a new site · submission methods.
How long until Google recrawls a page?
Anywhere from hours to months. Crawl frequency tracks how often a page changes and how important Google judges it — a homepage may be recrawled daily, a deep page a few times a year.
Can I force a recrawl?
No. You can request one, and requesting is worth doing after a meaningful change. Nothing forces Google to act on the request, and no tool can sell you that ability.
Google is showing an old title. Is that a recrawl problem?
Not always. Google sometimes recrawls a page and still rewrites or retains a title it considers better for the query. Check the URL Inspection date first — if it crawled after your change, the issue is title selection, not crawling.
I deleted a page. How do I get it out of the index?
Return 404 or 410 and let it drop, or use the Removals tool for something urgent. Do not leave a deleted page returning 200 with empty content — that becomes a soft 404 and lingers.
Know when the recrawl actually happened.
We re-inspect your URLs on a schedule and flag when a page drops out of the index — not just when it went in. 25 free.
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