A client says a page "is not on Google". That sentence can mean four different problems. Google may not know the URL exists. It may know the URL but not be allowed to crawl it. It may crawl it but be told not to index it. Or it may index a different URL as the main version. Each problem has a different fix, and the checks hide each other if you run them in the wrong order.
This article walks through one hypothetical page, https://www.example.com/services/data-audit/, and a diagnostic order that keeps the layers apart. The only tools are Google Search Console and the page itself.
Start with URL Inspection, not a guess
Open URL Inspection in Search Console and paste the exact URL, including protocol, host and trailing slash. The default result is the indexed version, which Google describes as "not a live test". It shows what Google stored at its last crawl.
Read these fields first, in this order:
- Crawl allowed? Whether robots.txt let Google crawl the page.
- Page fetch: Whether Google got the page from the server.
- Indexing allowed? Whether the page explicitly disallowed indexing.
- User-declared canonical and Google-selected canonical. Which URL the page points to and which one Google chose.
- Sitemaps and Referring page. How Google found the URL.
Then run the live test to see the page as it is now. The two views answer different questions. The indexed result explains the past. The live test checks current access. According to the same help page, the live test does not check sitemaps, referring pages, duplicates or canonical selection, and it does not confirm that the page will be indexed.
