How to Check Search Indexing for Any Web Page on the Internet
5th June, 2025
Note: For the purpose of this post, we are covering Google bot and Bing bot.
Google and Bing search provide Google Search Console or the Bing Webmasters tool to website owners to check if a certain URL is indexed or not. However, we may not always have access to these tools for the websites we may want to check. The post details how we can make such checks for any URL on the internet without access to Google Search Console or the Bing Webmasters tool.
Checking for Indexing of Certain Content
To find out if a certain content present on a certain URL is indexed by Google bot or no, we can enter the URL along with the specific text in the Google search bar in the format site:https://<example.com>/<url> content-to-look-for.
If indexed, the Google search results will show the searched text as well as the mentioned URL in the search results.
Bing
With Bing, the same approach as that described with Googlebot works well - but with a slight change and some caveats. Here, instead of entering the full URL, entering the base URL yields the desired results. So, the format site:https://<example.com>/ content-to-look-for allows us to check for the content we are looking for.
But, before reaching conclusions with respect to Bing verification, following are a few caveats to keep in mind:
- The search with the actual full URL (instead of the base URL)
site:https://<example.com>/<url> content-to-look-formay work in some situations but there is no clear trend as to when it works / doesn’t work. So, I refrain from using the full URL for indexing verification. - When searching for a certain content with the base URL, the matching URL is always returned in the search results if the content is indexed but it may not always be highlighted in the results text (like it did in the screenshot above). My inference from this Bing search is that the content is indexed (irrespective of whether it is highlighted in the results text or not).
- The search with the base URL approach suggested here may not be helpful if the content we are looking for is present in many pages on the website.
Checking for Indexing of Images
There are a couple of ways to check if a certain image is indexed by Google bot:
One approach is to simply go to https://images.google.com/ and enter the URL on which the image in question is present. This displays the indexed set of images.
However, this approach may also show additional similar images that may not be present on the entered URL. Also, this approach may not work well for pages with a very large number of images.
In such situations, we can use Google’s ‘Search By Image’ feature:
With ‘Search By Image’, we can enter the image URL for Google to perform a reverse image lookup. Here, if the image is present in Google’s search index, the ‘Exact matches’ tab displays one or more URLs where Google found the image.
Bing
With Bing, I have not found an approach that can be consistently used to determine if a specific image on a certain URL is indexed by Bing bot or not.
Conclusion
With both Google and Bing, there are adequate ways to find out if a certain content is being indexed or not. All things considered, if a certain content is very recent (went live within the last few weeks) and not appearing to be indexed, it is vital to allow some time to pass. However, if there is a pattern with respect to a certain kind of content (specific categories, pages, etc) not appearing to be indexed, the steps mentioned above can provide initial insights for a further deep-dive.