How Fast Google Finds a New Local Page

Ask most SEO vendors how long it takes Google to find a new page and you'll get a shrug dressed up as expertise: "it depends, could be days, could be weeks." I can answer it with a timestamp, because every URL I ship gets submitted to Google's Indexing API within 24 hours of going live, and the submission log is committed to a git repository as a permanent audit trail. "Did it get submitted, and when" is a question with a receipt, not a guess.

Why the answer usually is weeks

Here's the honest version of the default. Without any nudge, Google discovers a new page whenever its crawler happens to wander back to your site — which, for a small or new site, can be three to six weeks. You can watch this yourself: open Search Console, go to the Pages report, and look at the "Last crawled" dates on your most recent posts. If your November content shows a first crawl in mid-December, that's your real speed, and your competitor who published the same month has been ranking while your page sat undiscovered.

That lag is the whole problem, and it compounds. A site that gets each new page in front of Google the day after publishing accumulates ranking signals from day one. A site crawled weeks late is always running behind on every single page. Over a year of weekly publishing, the gap doesn't close — it widens, because the head start on each post carries forward.

What "submitted within 24 hours" actually runs on

The mechanism is deliberately unglamorous. A scheduled job runs every morning on GitHub's servers, submits the day's new URLs to Google's Indexing API, and commits the log back to the repository. No JSON key files to leak, no manual button, no person at a keyboard. Up to a couple hundred URLs a day per site, which is far more than any local business publishes. The cost to run it is zero — the API is free, the compute is free.

The part I like most is the audit trail. Every URL ever submitted, every timestamp, in plain text, in the repo. It's portable: if the underlying tool ever changed, the log moves with it. That's the difference between "trust me, it's handled" and "here's the file."

The caveat, because the caveat is the trust move

I won't oversell it. Google's Indexing API is officially scoped to a couple of narrow content types, and in practice it accepts general URLs and triggers a crawl — but if Google ever enforced the spec strictly, that pathway could close. The fallback is IndexNow, the protocol Bing runs and Google now also respects, plus manual submission for priority pages. The log is portable to either. So the crawl-speed advantage is durable even if one pipe gets narrowed, and I'd rather tell you that now than have you find the asterisk later.

Here's the test I'd actually hand you: ask your current vendor for their indexing log. Not a report — the log, with URLs and timestamps. If they can't produce one, they don't have this, and your new pages are waiting on the crawler's whims. It's the same committed-history discipline behind everything I ship. Then ask me. Inquire about a project →