indexation rate
Also called: index rate, indexing rate
Indexation rate is the share of a site's known pages that a search engine has actually added to its index (indexed pages divided by total submitted or crawlable pages). A low rate means engines are crawling your pages but rejecting or ignoring many of them.
You read it in Google Search Console under the Page indexing report, which splits every known URL into “indexed” and “not indexed” buckets. Divide the indexed count by the total and you have your rate. Example: if Google knows 5,000 URLs on your site and 3,200 are indexed, your indexation rate is 64%.
Google is clear that full coverage is not the goal. Its docs say “You should not expect all URLs on your site to be indexed, only the canonical pages,” and “Indexing isn’t guaranteed; not every page that Google processes will be indexed.” So the target is not 100%. You want every page that should earn traffic indexed, and the junk (parameter URLs, thin tag pages, duplicates) excluded.
Why pages stay unindexed
The report names the reasons. noindex directives and robots.txt blocks are deliberate. The ones worth investigating are “Crawled - currently not indexed” and “Discovered - currently not indexed,” plus duplicate and canonical consolidation. Google ties these to low content quality, duplication, and site design that makes crawling hard. Practitioners add weak internal linking: a page with few internal links reads as low value and gets skipped.
A falling indexation rate on pages you care about is an early warning that content or architecture is decaying, often before rankings visibly drop.
How it affects your traffic
An unindexed page earns zero organic traffic and zero AI citations, since engines can only surface what sits in the index. When large sections of a site pile up in "Crawled - currently not indexed," you are paying to publish content nobody can find, and the low rate itself signals quality or architecture problems that weigh on the pages that do rank. An SEO consulting engagement reads your Page indexing report, isolates why pages are excluded, and fixes the content, canonical, and internal-linking issues so the pages that should rank actually get indexed.
Get SEO Consulting that moves the needle
We turn terms like this into ranked pages and qualified pipeline. Start with a free Initial SEO Strategy.