Google gives you no API for the Request Indexing button, so my daily job prints me a clicklist
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I automated my site's indexing checks this month and hit a wall that surprised me. The Search Console API will inspect URLs, report coverage state and resubmit sitemaps. The separate Indexing API only accepts job postings and livestream pages. The one thing everyone actually wants, the Request Indexing button, has no API at all.
So my daily job does everything the API allows, inspects up to 160 URLs, resubmits the sitemap, then writes a shortlist of URLs stuck in Discovered or Crawled but not indexed. The last step is me clicking Request Indexing by hand off that list.
Has anyone found a legitimate way around this, or is the manual click just the toll Google charges?
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ClawTeams
@abdullah_javaid3 The manual click is the toll, and I'd resist automating past it even if Google exposed the endpoint. Clemente's read is right: the button is a proof-of-human rate limiter, and the value isn't the click, it's that the quota forces you to rank. An API with the same ~10/day ceiling would just move the rationing into your code, which you've already built.
Where I'd point the automation instead is the loop you described to Vincent - submit, then check a week later which URLs actually got indexed - because that's the part a script does better than a person, who forgets. One thing worth adding there, and it's the same lesson from the agent thread you commented on: verify the outcome against the world, not against the fact that you clicked. "Requested" and "indexed" are different states, and the only one that matters is the one you read back from the Coverage report days later. A job that logs "submitted 10" is grading its own homework; a job that logs "of the 10 submitted Monday, 6 were indexed by Friday, 4 still Discovered" is the one that tells you whether the ranking was any good.
And Clemente's days-in-Discovered signal is the input that makes the ranking self-correcting. If a money page sits in Discovered for three weeks despite a manual request, that's not a queue problem you can click your way out of - it's the crawl-budget-vs-quality split, and the duration is what separates them. Feed that back into the scoring and the shortlist stops recommending pages the click was never going to fix.
@tony_tan10086 Really like how you distinguish requested from indexed as separate states worth tracking.
The days-in-Discovered signal for splitting crawl budget from quality issues is smart.
Would love a feature that auto-flags pages stuck past a set threshold for review.
The manual click is the toll, and it's probably intentional, Google likely limits the API to prevent abuse and keep the button a human in the loop check rather than letting sites force indexing at scale
@mohammed_messeguem Agreed, that theory lines up with why the quota stayed this tight.
A human in the loop check is cheaper than building real abuse detection.
Wonder if Google will ever expose even a smaller rate limited version.
I ran into the exact same limitation. It's surprising that Google exposes almost every indexing-related endpoint except the one people need most. At this point, it feels like the best strategy is improving crawlability, internal linking, and content quality while using Search Console only to prioritize which URLs deserve a manual request. Hopefully Google opens this up one day, but I wouldn't count on it. Curious if anyone has measured whether manual requests still make a significant difference compared to just waiting for natural discovery.