If you have ever opened the Pages report in Google Search Console and spotted a status like “crawled, currently not indexed” or “discovered, currently not indexed” next to a chunk of your site, you have probably assumed something is broken. According to Google’s own engineers, it usually is not a technical fault at all.
On this week’s episode of Search Off the Record, Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt talked through how to interpret the Search Console indexing report. Mueller explained that when Google’s systems have serious concerns about a website’s overall quality, they simply choose to crawl and index less of it. That is what shows up as “crawled not indexed” or “discovered not indexed” in your reporting, as Search Engine Roundtable reported.
AI-generated content came up specifically. Mueller was careful to say that AI-written content is not automatically a problem. The issue is content that reads as though anyone could have written it, with nothing unique or valuable added. A page like that gives Google little reason to index it, regardless of how it was produced.
Mueller was fairly blunt about this part. If you see a handful of pages sitting as “not indexed”, that is not usually worth chasing individually. But if the pattern is widespread across your site, and there is no obvious technical reason for it, he suggested taking a step back and looking at your content the way someone with no attachment to it would. That is a harder exercise than it sounds, since most business owners are, understandably, quite fond of their own website.
This connects neatly to a point we made in an earlier piece about unedited AI content and rankings: the question worth asking of any page is whether a visitor could find the same thing, in essentially the same form, somewhere else. If the honest answer is yes, that page is a candidate for a rewrite rather than a technical fix.
If you are not sure whether your own site shows this pattern, working through Search Console yourself is the quickest way to find out, or you can have someone else do it properly as part of a website health SEO audit, which will flag indexing gaps like this alongside the more familiar technical checks.
The practical takeaway from Mueller’s comments is not to obsess over the exact status of every individual page. It is to occasionally look at your own website the way a stranger would, and ask honestly whether each page earns its place. If you would not recommend a competitor’s identical page to a friend, there is little reason to expect Google to recommend yours.
