GSC Index Coverage report vs URL Inspection API at scale

GSC Index Coverage report vs URL Inspection API at scale

For index monitoring on programmatic sites, the report and the API solve different scales.

1. Index Coverage / Pages report: aggregate health by reason (crawled-not-indexed, discovered-not-indexed). Use to spot a template-wide problem fast.
— Limit: sampled, lagging, can't tell you the status of one specific URL on demand.
2. URL Inspection API: exact, live status per URL. Use to verify a sample of 100-2000 URLs per template programmatically.
— Limit: 2000 calls/day per property — you cannot inspect a million pages.
3. Decision rule: trend and triage → Coverage report. Confirm a specific template's true index rate → sample via the API.
4. Owner-action: nightly job inspects a rotating sample per template, stores index-rate over time.
5. Gate: any template under 60% index rate after 4 weeks → enrich or prune, don't keep generating more.

Rollback: n/a — monitoring only.

Ship gate: don't publish until all boxes are checked.