Visibility check.
The visibility check reads, in one pass, the five signals that can keep a page out of Google — server response, robots.txt, noindex, canonical address and sitemap.
How to use
- Enter the address of the page that does not show up on Google
- Press Check; the server reads the page, robots.txt and the sitemap
- Read the lines: a line saying “blocked” shows where the problem most likely is
This tool sends the address you enter to this site’s own server; the server reads that address, returns the result to your browser and stores nothing.
The most common reasons a page never shows up on Google are technical, and all five can be read from the page itself: the server returns an error, robots.txt forbids crawling, the page says “noindex”, the canonical address points to a different page, or the page is missing from the sitemap. This tool reads all five in one pass and, for each, says “blocked”, “check this” or “not blocked”.
What if it says “not blocked” but the page still does not show up?
Then the problem is most likely not technical: the page may be new, Google may have crawled it but chosen not to index it, or stronger pages compete for the same query. All of these cases, and how to see them in Search Console, are covered one by one in the guide Why your website does not show up on Google. Knowing there is no technical block is a result too: the rest of the search work is a matter of content and links — SEO consulting.
Why it is read from the server
A browser cannot read another site on its own: the content security policy and CORS prevent it. The address goes to this site’s server; the server reads it under its own identity, returns the result to your browser and stores neither the address nor the result. The same server route is used by the machine reading tool and is described in the privacy notice.
Limits
Each reading gives up after six seconds and follows at most four redirects. If the sitemap is an index file, the child sitemaps are not read, and the line says so plainly. To prevent abuse, requests are limited to twelve per minute per IP. The check gives no score: a score would imitate a decision Google has not made.