For a short window on 8 September 2026, Google Search Console reported pages as “Crawled - currently not indexed” that were, in fact, indexed. Homepages included. Some site owners watched a fifth of a small site flip to not indexed inside the reports, with older and thinner pages flipping first, while the same pages sat in Google’s results the whole time.
Google has now confirmed it. John Mueller, on Bluesky on 9 September:
“I double-checked with the team, and it was a short blip that was resolved quickly in the night (before these posts happened). It’s good that it’s easy to double-check things like the indexing of the homepage. Sorry for the confusion!”
So: a reporting bug, resolved within about an hour, and nothing touched the index itself. Rankings and traffic were never at risk. The only thing that broke was the label in the report.
How to tell a reporting bug from real deindexing
The reason this blip spread so fast is that “Crawled - currently not indexed” is usually a status worth taking seriously. I have a whole guide on what it normally means. The skill worth keeping from this incident is telling the two apart, because the next blip will not come with a same-day confirmation.
The checks, in the order I run them on client sites:
- Inspect the homepage first. A homepage of an established site does not fall out of the index quietly. If URL Inspection says your homepage is not indexed while a search for your brand name still returns it, you are looking at a reporting fault, not an indexing one. This is the exact check Mueller pointed at.
- Check the actual results page. Search for an exact sentence from the “not indexed” page in quotes. If the page comes back, it is indexed, whatever the report says. The report is a description of the index, not the index.
- Look at your traffic, not your labels. Real deindexing shows up in the performance report and in analytics within days. A label that flips on dozens of pages at once while impressions stay flat is a label problem.
- Check whether it is only you. When many unrelated sites report the same flip within the same hour, that pattern is a Google-side fault. One site drifting into a status over weeks is a site problem.
- Wait one recheck before acting. Inspect the same URLs again a few hours later. This blip corrected itself before most people finished screenshotting it.
What not to do during a blip
The expensive reaction is the reflexive one: select everything, hit Request Indexing, resubmit sitemaps, and burn quota on pages that were never out of the index. URL Inspection requests are capped per day, and if you run bulk inspection through the API, that quota is 2,000 URLs per property per day. Spending it re-verifying a false alarm is the only real cost this bug could have created on your side.
Do not change the site either. No noindex audits, no canonical rewrites, no “content quality” purges triggered by a report that was wrong for an hour. I have seen more damage done reacting to Search Console than I have seen done by Search Console being briefly wrong.
The lesson that outlasts the bug
Search Console reporting and Google’s index are two systems. They agree almost all of the time, and the reports are still the best free window into indexing that exists. But when a status makes no sense, the tiebreaker is always the live index: inspect it, search it, measure it. That habit is free, and on 8 September it was the difference between shrugging and a panicked evening.
There is a second reason to keep your own record. Not every reporting failure gets repaired: the same report is permanently missing days from June 2026, and Mueller has confirmed Google does not back-fill indexing data. A blip corrects itself. A gap does not.
If your pages still show “Crawled - currently not indexed” today, after the fix, then it is not the blip. That is the ordinary meaning of the status, and the guide covers the causes and fixes. And if you want the per-URL truth across a whole sitemap instead of one inspection at a time, that is what my bulk URL inspection tool is for.