For about two months, business owners and SEO professionals have reported that pages have been removed from Google’s index without a clear explanation.
The reports started in late April and have continued into June. In many of those reports, the affected pages had neither a manual action nor a crawl error. They moved into “excluded” or “crawled, currently not indexed” buckets and stayed there.
Google has said it sees nothing unusual in the data. One detailed independent investigation comes from Glenn Gabe, who traced a single site’s full drop from the index.
Many of these reports aren’t deindexing at all. They’re ranking losses, canonical choices, or reporting noise that get filed under the same word.
If you read yours wrong and act on it, a recoverable drop can become a permanent loss.
What SEO Pros Are Reporting
The current wave traces to a late-April question from Pedro Dias, a former Google employee. He asked whether others were seeing pages leave the index at a higher rate. Many said they were, describing the same pattern.
The status doing the most work in these reports is “crawled, currently not indexed.” It means Google fetched the page and chose not to index it. That differs from a page Google has discovered but not yet crawled.
Some accounts described whole properties moving into that status rather than a handful of URLs. One site owner reported almost an entire site deindexed after the March core update. Another, indexed for six years, watched every page flip to the same status.
John Mueller of Google addressed the reports the same week. He described the movement as ordinary and said he didn’t see anything exceptional. Site owners did not find that reassuring, because the reports were arriving from many properties at once.
Where The Reports Fit
Google’s 2026 ranking calendar has been dense. A spam update and a core update ran in March, and a broad core update ran in May. We covered how the May update reshaped visibility, with Reddit gaining top positions across every niche one vendor tracked.
Two months earlier, Amsive found the March update moving visibility away from aggregators. The same kinds of sites moved in opposite directions across two updates.
Core updates change rankings, and ranking changes are easy to mistake for deindexing. A page that loses impressions still sits in the index. None of this proves the updates caused the reports, but it explains the noisy backdrop they arrived against.
This isn’t the first time Google has framed large-scale removal as a quality or perception issue. Previously, Gary Illyes said a high number of “crawled, currently not indexed” URLs “could hint at general quality issues,” and described cases where Google’s view of a site had shifted. That’s precedent, not an explanation for this year’s reports.
What To Do
First, Confirm The Data Is Real
Before you classify anything, make sure the data is real. Search Console has had reporting issues this year.
Google’s Data Anomalies page documents a logging error that misreported impressions from May 2025 until late April 2026. The fix applies going forward, and Google has said it will not restore the historical data.
The impression error inflated the counts, so the correction appears as a drop. A site that saw impressions fall in early May may be reading the fix rather than a loss of visibility. Clicks were not affected by that error, which makes click data your steadier signal in this window.
One clean check compares a pre-bug window with a post-fix window in the Performance report. Cross-reference your click trend with GA4 organic sessions to see whether actual traffic moved. The reported anomalies sit in the Performance and Discover reports. The Page Indexing report and URL Inspection aren’t listed among them.
To confirm whether a specific URL is actually in the index, Google’s URL Inspection tool is the documented way. A “site:” search is a rough orientation check, not a reliable read of index status.
The Distinction That Decides Everything
Most of the diagnostic work is sorting one symptom into the right cause. “My pages are gone” can mean several different things, and the response changes with each.
Real deindexing means a URL that was indexed is now absent. You confirm it in URL Inspection, where the status reads not indexed and gives a reason. This is the case the reports describe, and it is worth confirming before you assume it.
A ranking loss is a common look-alike. The page stays indexed but appears lower or for fewer queries. After a core update, that’s the more frequent outcome. The page is still there. It’s earning fewer impressions, which a dashboard can present as a cliff. We’ve covered why the “discovered, currently not indexed” status can persist for reasons that have nothing to do with a penalty.
Canonical consolidation is a third case. Google keeps the content but credits a different URL, so your chosen page reads as not selected. In URL Inspection, that surfaces as a duplicate where Google chose a different canonical than the one you set. Technical blocking is a fourth. A stray noindex, a robots rule, or a server error can pull a page without any algorithmic judgment behind it. Martin Splitt has walked through how a page moves from discovery to indexing, and most “missing” pages fail at a step you can name.
The fifth case is the reporting artifact, and the impressions correction above is the live example. Gabe’s investigation is a useful model. He worked through his Search Console properties until the cause surfaced. A manual action that wasn’t initially visible appeared later. In that case, the early absence didn’t rule one out. Confirm status, find the failed step, then act.
Why This Matters For Your Audit
The reports cluster around specific site types, so your exposure depends on what you run.
Publishers and programmatic sites carry the largest footprints, and thin or templated pages are the first to look expendable. If you run thousands of similar pages, sample them in URL Inspection rather than trusting the aggregate count. The count can move for reasons unrelated to quality.
Ecommerce sites often have variant and faceted URLs collapsing into one. Pages might appear as not selected rather than removed, so verify before treating them as a loss. Affiliate and comparison sites are near the quality line, where “crawled, currently not indexed” issues tend to cluster.
Local and service-area sites face this through their location pages. A set of near-duplicate city pages is the kind of thin template Google tends to skip first.
If your index count falls there, sample a few of those URLs in URL Inspection before you react. The fix for thin location pages is to consolidate or strengthen them, not to file a panic ticket.
Agencies have the hardest version of the job. A panicked client says, “We aren’t in Google,” when the truth is usually narrower. The first move is to confirm the scope, then confirm a cause. A site that lost ten percent of a thin section is one conversation. A site that lost its money pages is another.
The riskiest cases this period are teams acting before they confirm. Some are adding noindex to “reset” pages, restructuring URL paths, or filing emergency tickets. All of it rests on a chart that may be a reporting artifact. Each of those moves can make a temporary problem permanent.
There is no trick to getting pages back. Google and SEO professionals keep pointing to stronger page value, clearer canonical signals, and cleaner crawl paths. None of that is guaranteed, and none of it happens fast.
Importantly, none of it helps unless you are fixing the problem you actually have.
What We Don’t Know
The cause is unconfirmed. Google hasn’t announced a change to indexing behavior, and Mueller has described the movement as ordinary.
Treat any single explanation, including the AI-content theory traveling through SEO forums, as a hypothesis rather than a finding. Nothing in Google’s public comments ties those reports to AI detection. The timing also overlaps with core updates that move rankings on their own.
There is also no reliable public measure of the true rate. Community reports show direction, not magnitude, and the recent reporting issues add noise to anyone trying to size it. Even a large volume of public reports doesn’t add up to a measured rate.
Looking Ahead
A confirmed update would settle this. So would a Google statement on indexing selectivity, or a clean stretch of reporting data.
If the bar for index inclusion is in fact rising, the split grows sharper. Sites with distinctive content hold up, and sites running large volumes of similar pages do not. That is still a hypothesis to test against your own pages, not a finding.
Until Google confirms a cause, the stance is diagnosis before action. Watch your URL Inspection results on a sample of affected pages. Keep click data as your anchor while impression reporting settles. Treat the index count as a number to verify rather than one to trust.
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