Track indexed-vs-not over time with -report and -diff

Want to know whether your pages are actually getting indexed as time goes on? Use -report to snapshot a run and -diff to compare against a previous one.

Snapshot a run with -report

-report <dir> writes three files into the directory you name:

./gsc-indexer -creds sa.json -batch urls.txt -report ./report

• indexed.txt. URLs Google has indexed.
• not-indexed.txt. everything else (not indexed, or errored).
• summary.json. counts + the full URL lists, in machine-readable form.

The run also prints a summary to your terminal:

SUMMARY: 87 indexed, 13 not indexed of 100 URLs
  → ./report/indexed.txt
  → ./report/not-indexed.txt

Compare runs with -diff

Later, re-run and point -diff at the saved summary.json:

./gsc-indexer -creds sa.json -batch urls.txt -diff ./report/summary.json

This prints what changed since the baseline:

  ▲ newly indexed:    https://www.toolsura.com/post-new/
  ▼ dropped (was indexed, now not): https://www.toolsura.com/post-stale/
...
DIFF vs ./report/summary.json
  indexed:   87 → 90  (+3)
  not index: 13 → 10  (-3)
  newly indexed: 3 | dropped: 1 | unchanged: 96

• ▲ newly indexed. URLs that moved from not-indexed to indexed.
• ▼ dropped. URLs that were indexed before but aren't now.

Update and compare in one pass

You can write a fresh report and diff against the previous one at the same time:

./gsc-indexer -creds sa.json -batch urls.txt -report ./report -diff ./report/summary.json

The diff uses the previous summary.json (read before it's overwritten), so this is safe to run on a schedule.

Next

• Large runs timing out? Throttling and quiet mode.
• Broken run? Troubleshooting.

Sources

• Google Search Console
• URL Inspection API documentation
• Google Search APIs overview
• Service account OAuth (Google Identity)
• About service accounts (Google Cloud IAM)
• Verify site ownership
• Property types: URL-prefix vs Domain
• URL Inspection tool help
• Indexing API (JobPosting/BroadcastEvent only)
• Request indexing / inspect a URL