Submitted is not indexed, and the difference costs you money

There are two events in the life of a URL, and most tools only observe the first one.

The first is submission: the URL is handed to a pipeline that asks Google to look at it. This is a request. It succeeds or fails, it happens in seconds or minutes, and it is entirely within the pipeline’s control.

The second is indexing: Google decides the page belongs in its index and starts returning it in results. This is a judgement. It happens on Google’s schedule, for Google’s reasons, and nobody outside Google controls it.

Why the distinction gets blurred

A dashboard that shows a green tick next to a URL the moment delivery succeeds is not lying, exactly. Delivery did succeed. But the reader takes that tick to mean the thing they actually paid for, which was the second event, not the first.

The gap between the two is where the money goes. You can submit ten thousand URLs successfully and have Google index four thousand of them, and a tool that only reports submission will show you ten thousand green ticks.

What we do instead

We report both events separately, and we check the second one against Google’s public results rather than against our own queue:

• Submitted — delivered to the pipeline. No check has run yet.
• Not yet indexed — checks have run and found nothing. More are scheduled.
• Indexed — found in Google’s results, with the date we found it.
• Not indexed as of <date> — every scheduled check has run without a match.
• Couldn’t check — the page returns noindex, a 404, or a robots block, so no check was billed.

That fourth state is the one most tools do not have. It is not an error and it is not a pending state; it is a settled negative answer, and it is genuinely useful — it tells you to go and look at the page rather than wait.