The process of analysing a crawled page and storing it in the search engine's index so it can appear in results.
ID
SS-DF-017
Confidence
High · 93
Evidence
Strong
Updated
2026-07-08
Definition
The process of analysing a crawled page and storing it in the search engine's index so it can appear in results.
Indexing is the stage after crawling where a search engine parses a page's content, renders it if needed, and decides whether to store it in its searchable database. Only indexed pages are eligible to rank in organic results or to be retrieved by AI systems that draw on a search index. Duplicate content, thin pages, noindex directives and quality signals all influence whether and how a page is indexed.