How to make Google recrawl your site is a question with exactly two honest answers, and neither of them is the one most articles lead with. Google documents two routes: ask through the URL Inspection tool for individual pages, or submit a sitemap for anything bigger. Everything else that gets recommended is either a wrapper around those two or does nothing at all. I run indexing jobs for a living, 727 of them completed at the time of writing, so the gap between what people believe about recrawling and what the crawl logs show is something I look at every day.
The part worth saying first, because no ranking article says it: a recrawl request is a hint to a crawl queue. It is not an indexing command. Google’s own documentation on asking Google to recrawl your URLs says crawling can take “anywhere from a few days to a few weeks”, that requesting a crawl “does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all”, and that submitting the same URL repeatedly “won’t get it crawled any faster”. All three sentences are Google’s, and all three get ignored.
The route for single pages: Request Indexing
Open the URL in the URL Inspection tool, run the live test, and press Request Indexing. That queues the URL for a crawl. What it does not do is skip the quality evaluation that follows the crawl, which is the part people think they are buying.
Two things I check on every job. First, the “Last crawl” date in the inspection panel: when a submit works, that date moves, usually well before anything changes in search results. If the date moves and the page still is not indexed, crawling was never your problem. Second, the quota: there is a daily limit, Google has never published the number, and every article that tells you “ten per day” is repeating a guess. I went through what is actually documented in how many URLs you can request indexing per day.
The route for everything else: sitemaps
For more than a handful of URLs, the button does not scale and the sitemap is the channel Google built for the job. Submit it once in Search Console, then keep the lastmod dates honest. Google says it uses lastmod only if it is “consistently and verifiably accurate”, which means a build process that rewrites every date on every deploy teaches Google to ignore yours. I covered the evidence in does Google use lastmod in sitemaps.
A sitemap resubmission is a discovery signal, not a crawl command. It tells Google which URLs changed and when. On a site Google already trusts, that is genuinely enough: the changed pages get picked up on the next scheduling pass without anyone pressing anything.
What about the Indexing API?
The Indexing API is documented for exactly two content types, job postings and livestream broadcast events, with a default quota of 200 publish requests a day. It is not a general recrawl channel, and using it as one is against its documented scope. The services that sell “unlimited fast indexing” are mostly reselling misuse of this API, which is why I wrote up whether indexing services work separately. For ordinary pages, the honest summary is: this route does not exist.
How long does it take Google to recrawl a page?
Google’s published range is a few days to a few weeks. What I see across client properties is that the range is real but the distribution is not flat. On a healthy site that Google already crawls willingly, a Request Indexing submit usually moves the “Last crawl” date within hours to a couple of days. On a weak site, a thin site, or a site with a large pile of low-value URLs, the same submit can sit for weeks or simply never convert into anything, and the wait was never really about the request. The longest job I have documented took 118 days end to end, at an average of nine deliberate submissions a day; the anatomy of that 118-day indexing job shows what a long tail actually looks like from inside.
What a recrawl will not fix
This is the check to run before you press anything. If the page is indexed but the snippet is stale, a recrawl helps. If the page is in Crawled, currently not indexed, Google has already been there and declined, and asking it to come back changes nothing until the page changes. If Google chose a different canonical, recrawling the loser does not re-run the vote. A recrawl fixes staleness. It does not fix a quality decision, and most “Google won’t recrawl my site” cases I audit are quality decisions wearing a crawling costume.
Sources
- Google Search Central, ask Google to recrawl your URLs, for the two documented routes, the timing range and the repeat-submission warning, checked 14 September 2026
- Google Search Console Help, URL Inspection tool, for Request Indexing and the unnumbered daily limit
- Google Search Central, sitemaps best practices, for lastmod being used when “consistently and verifiably accurate”
- Google, Indexing API quickstart and quota page, for the two supported content types and the 200 requests per day default
- My own order ledger, 727 completed indexing jobs at the time of writing, and the crawl-date behaviour described from daily URL Inspection use across client properties