Request Indexing in Search Console
You pressed Request Indexing, it worked for a URL or two, and then the button went grey. This page is about what happens next, and why the answer is almost never "press it more".
What the Request Indexing button actually does
It adds a single URL to Google's priority crawl queue. That is all it does. It does not index the page, and Google is explicit that it does not guarantee inclusion. It solves a discovery problem for one URL. It does not solve a quality problem, and it does not scale.
Requesting the same URL repeatedly does not improve your odds. The queue position is the same whether you press it once or thirty times.
The daily quota
Google has never published the number. It has tightened over the years, and in practice you get somewhere in the region of ten to twenty requests per property per day before the option greys out. That is an observation, not a documented limit.
Why that does not scale
Some arithmetic, because this is the whole point:
| URLs to submit | Days of manual work |
|---|---|
| 50 | 3 to 5 |
| 200 | 10 to 20 |
| 1,000 | 50 to 100 |
| 4,000 | 200 to 400 |
A 4,000-page site at ten to twenty URLs a day is two hundred to four hundred days of pressing the button, every single day, without missing one. During that time you publish more pages, and some of the ones you already requested drop back out of the index without telling you.
Indexing is not permanent. Google reassesses continually, and pages disappear with no notification. A method that handles the moment of publication has nothing to say about month fourteen.
There is no bulk version of Request Indexing
Search Console has no batch submission. The Google Indexing API is officially scoped to job postings and broadcast events, not general web pages — anyone offering to run your whole site through it is using it outside its documented scope. Browser extensions and scripts that drive the Request Indexing button exist, and they work in ways Google's terms do not permit. It is your risk assessment, on the property that carries your organic traffic. If pages are missing rather than new, why Google is not indexing your pages is the better starting point.
What a sitemap does instead
A sitemap carries every URL on your site in a single file, with no cap at all. It is the mechanism Google actually supports for site-wide submission.
We rebuild yours daily from what actually exists on your site, so new pages are in it the day after you publish, deleted pages come out, and accurate lastmod tells Google which pages genuinely changed. We keep your sitemap current so Google can discover it, and push every changed URL to Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam through IndexNow within minutes.
The honest trade
What you give up is the priority-queue nudge Request Indexing gives to one URL. What you get is complete coverage of all 4,000, automatically, every day, without you pressing anything.
For a handful of important pages, use the button. It is the right tool and it is fast. For a systemic gap across a whole site, a current sitemap is the mechanism that scales.
From £29 a month per site, no VAT. The daily rebuild needs no access to your site — one small one-off step on your side and you are set.
Is this the same as Request Indexing in Search Console?
No, and the difference works in your favour. Request Indexing is a manual, one-URL-at-a-time button with a small daily cap, usually around ten to twenty URLs. On a 4,000-page site that would take the best part of a year, assuming you did it every single day without missing one.
A sitemap carries every URL on your site in a single file, with no cap at all. We rebuild yours daily from what actually exists, so new pages are in it the day after you publish, deleted pages come out, and accurate lastmod tells Google which pages genuinely changed.
What you give up is the priority-queue nudge Request Indexing gives to one URL. What you get is complete coverage of all 4,000, automatically.