Google URL Inspection Tool Shows Marketers What The Search Engine Sees

Google will now allow marketers to check specific URLs on their websites to learn how Google’s search technology actually sees them.

The feature, made available on Monday in the Google Search Console, is called the URL inspection tool, and will become available to Google Search Console users in the coming weeks.

The URL Inspection tool provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about pages from the Google index. Google will show the last crawl date and status, any crawling or indexing errors, and the canonical URL for that page.

The information shown in the tool is used by Google to evaluate search results. If the page was successfully indexed, marketers can see information and learn the status of any changes found on the page, such as linked Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) version or results like jobs, or recipes.

If the page does not index, the report will explain why. It also contains data such as noindex robots metatags and Google's canonical URL for the page.

Google has published a complete guide on the URL inspection tool to help marketers gain a better understanding of the feature.

It’s important to note that the tool describes the most recently indexed version of a page, not the live version on the web, according to Google.

Google has also launched a few other features and reports in the new Search Console. Some include 16 months of traffic data, the ability to fix structured data issues affecting recipes in search results, and new search appearance filters in search analytics that provide more data for Web Light and Google Play Instant, along with others.

Next story loading loading..