Google Search Console wrongly showed indexed pages as not indexed for hours

Google Search Console reported many indexed URLs as "Crawled - currently not indexed" for a short window on the evening of 8 September Pacific time. John Mueller confirmed on Bluesky at 5:50 AM the next morning that the underlying index was not affected and that the reporting had corrected itself overnight. Search Engine Roundtable published the confirmation at 5:59 AM.

What happened, and what it did not

The bug was in the Page Indexing report, which showed a set of pages as newly non-indexed even when they had been indexed shortly before. Some site owners reported roughly a fifth of their pages moving into the "Crawled - currently not indexed" group, which is the reason the report drew attention within hours.

Mueller's post is the primary source. "I double-checked with the team, and it was a short blip that was resolved quickly in the night," he wrote on Bluesky. There was no announcement on the Search Central blog and no incident on the Search Status Dashboard, which suggests Google treated it as a reporting fault rather than a search-side outage.

The URL Inspection tool told a consistent story throughout: the pages in question returned "URL is on Google" while the aggregate report still counted them as excluded. That distinction is the useful one, because URL Inspection reads live index state and the report is a daily snapshot rebuilt from a different pipeline.

What a working team can do about this

The action is short: nothing. If you saw the drop in the report last night, treat it as a reporting artifact and move on. The pages that appeared to fall out have not fallen out.

Two things are worth pinning down anyway, both for the next time this happens.

The first is the quick check to use. When the Page Indexing report and the URL Inspection tool disagree for the same URL, URL Inspection wins, because it queries live index state at the moment you click. A large gap between the two on a set of URLs you know are healthy is a strong signal that the fault is in the reporting layer rather than in Google's index. That is a cheaper first check than pulling logs or refreshing sitemaps.

The second is what to tell an anxious stakeholder. A short-lived, unexplained fall in Search Console coverage is a common event, and Google confirms it after the fact through Mueller or the Search Liaison account rather than through a formal status page. A team in the habit of screenshotting a bad report and forwarding it to management will spend the morning explaining a bug that fixed itself hours ago. Set the expectation now: a sudden fall in coverage overnight, with no matching ranking or traffic change in Search Analytics, is almost always this kind of fault. Traffic and impressions are the real signal; the coverage report is a delayed count taken from a different table.

Google Search Console has no public API for this specific report, so external monitors that scrape it will register the same false drop and the same silent recovery. If your dashboards read those, expect a matching spike on the incident report today.

Source

Search Engine Roundtable: Google confirmed indexing reporting bug from yesterday as short blip, 9 September 2026, quoting John Mueller's Bluesky confirmation.