How to Get Google to Recrawl Your Site

To get Google to recrawl your site, use one of the two methods Google itself lists. For a few pages, inspect each URL with the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console and click Request indexing, which puts the URL in a priority crawl queue. For many pages, update the <lastmod> dates of the changed pages in your sitemap and submit the sitemap again. A Google recrawl can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Clicking twice the same day does nothing; a page still missing a week later is worth asking for again.

You cannot force a recrawl, but you can make it happen sooner. Below are both methods step by step, how often Google recrawls on its own (with crawl dates from our own site), and what changes the speed.

The two ways to ask Google to recrawl your site

Google's help page Ask Google to recrawl your URLs names exactly two methods. Pick by how many URLs changed.

Method 1: Recrawl one page with URL Inspection

1. Open Google Search Console and select the property the page belongs to.
2. Paste the full URL into the search bar at the top and press Enter.
3. Click Test live URL. Wait for URL is available to Google. If the live test finds a problem (a noindex tag, a robots.txt block, a failed fetch), fix it first: a recrawl of a broken page changes nothing.
4. Click Request indexing. Search Console shows "Testing if live URL can be indexed" for a minute or two, then "Indexing requested" with the note that the URL was added to a priority crawl queue.
5. Come back in a few days, inspect the URL again and look at Last crawl in the Page indexing card. A date after your request means Google recrawled it.

Clicking twice the same day does nothing; a page still missing a week later is worth asking for again. If you see "Quota exceeded", you have used the property's quota for the day; the rest waits until tomorrow. For a full tour of the fields on that screen, see our URL Inspection tool guide.

Method 2: Recrawl your whole site with a sitemap

1. Update lastmod for the pages that changed. In your sitemap, each changed URL's <lastmod> should show the date of its last real update. Google uses lastmod only when it is consistently accurate, so do not set every URL to today.
2. Make sure the sitemap lists the URLs. New sections and pages need to be in it; removed and redirected URLs should come out.
3. Submit the sitemap again. In Search Console, open Sitemaps under Indexing, enter the sitemap URL in Add a new sitemap and click Submit. Google's help says resubmitting is the right move after big changes; for small ones, Google picks up the new lastmod dates on its next regular read.
4. Watch Last read. The Sitemaps report shows when Google last processed the file. After that, URLs with new lastmod dates get recrawled over the following days and weeks, starting with the ones Google considers most important.

Our guide on how to submit a sitemap to Google covers the Sitemaps report and its statuses in detail.

How often does Google recrawl a site?

There is no fixed schedule. Google recrawls each URL on its own timetable, based on how important the page looks, how often it has changed before and how much crawling your server can take. Homepages and pages that change often get recrawled within days. Deep pages that rarely change can wait months.

Here is what that looks like on a real site. On October 31, 2026 we ran URL Inspection on 71 URLs of indexmachine.co (the homepage, pricing, blog posts, comparison pages and free tools) and read the Last crawl date of each:

The median URL had last been crawled 42 days earlier. The homepage had been crawled 5 days earlier and the pricing page 8 days earlier, while the 27 blog URLs (the blog index and its posts) averaged 39 days and the 18 alternative pages 47 days. The oldest crawl was 131 days back, on a tools page that Google reported as "Crawled - currently not indexed".

This is a small, well-linked site, and still more than half of its pages had not been recrawled in six weeks. If you update one of those pages today and do nothing, Google may keep showing the old version for another month or two. That is the case where asking for a recrawl pays off.

To see how often Google crawls your own site, open Settings in Search Console and click Open report next to Crawl stats. It shows total crawl requests per day, response codes, and crawl purpose split into Discovery (new URLs) and Refresh (recrawls of known URLs).

Can you force Google to recrawl your site?

No. Both methods are requests, and Google decides when, and whether, to crawl. Google's own wording is that its systems prioritize the fast inclusion of high quality, useful content, and that requesting a crawl does not guarantee inclusion in search results.

A few things that look like shortcuts and are not:

• The Indexing API is limited by Google to pages with job postings or livestream video. Using it for ordinary pages is outside its rules.
• The old crawl rate setting let you slow Googlebot down, never speed it up, and Google removed it in January 2024.
• Sitemap ping URLs stopped working: Google announced in June 2023 that the endpoint was going away.
• Pinging services that promise to force a Google recrawl have no access to anything beyond the methods above: a sitemap, links and URL Inspection.

What makes Google recrawl a page sooner?

Since you cannot force it, raise the odds. These are the levers that move Google's priority for a URL:

• Internal links from pages Google crawls often. A link from your homepage or a popular page tells Google the target matters and gives Googlebot a path to it on every visit.
• Accurate lastmod dates. When Google learns your lastmod is honest, it uses it to decide what to refetch.
• A fast, stable server. Google slows crawling when a site answers slowly or returns 5xx errors. Fixing errors and timeouts lets it crawl more.
• Less crawl waste. Redirect chains, endless parameter URLs and 404s in your sitemap use crawl capacity that your real pages could get.
• Real updates. Pages that change in meaningful ways get recrawled more often than pages that only change a date.
• Links from other sites. A new link from a page Google crawls often leads Google back to yours.

Special cases: robots.txt, removed pages and Bing

robots.txt. Google caches your robots.txt for up to a day. If you fixed a rule that blocked Googlebot and cannot wait, open Settings in Search Console, then the robots.txt report, click the three-dot menu next to the file and choose Request a recrawl. Before you do, run the file through the free robots.txt checker to make sure the new rules allow what you expect.

Removed or outdated pages. A recrawl of a deleted page eventually drops it from the index. To hide it from results faster, use the Removals tool in Search Console (a temporary block while Google catches up). For an outdated result from a site you do not own, Google has a separate public tool, Refresh Outdated Content.

Bing and other engines. Bing does not use your Google sitemap submission. IndexNow is the fast route there: one call tells Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and the other participating engines that a URL changed, and they share submissions with each other. Our page on IndexNow vs full indexing automation explains what it does and does not cover.

How long does a Google recrawl take?

Google's documentation says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. A single URL asked for through URL Inspection sits in a priority queue, while a sitemap-driven recrawl of a large site spreads over weeks. Do not guess: the Last crawl date in URL Inspection tells you when it happened. A recrawl is also not the same as being indexed: after the crawl, Google still decides whether to keep the page. For timelines by site type, see how long Google takes to index new pages.

Get new and dropped pages crawled every day, on autopilot

The URL Inspection method works, but only one URL at a time, within a daily quota, and only on the days you remember to do it. For a site that publishes often, that becomes a daily chore.

IndexMachine does it for you. New pages in your sitemap are picked up automatically, and its Chrome extension presses Google's own Request indexing button in your Search Console, on autopilot, every day, for every page Google has not indexed yet, using your full daily Google quota on every site. Every requested page is tracked until it is on Google, and any page that drops out of the index is requested again automatically. Every other engine gets unlimited IndexNow.

For an updated page that is already indexed, use Method 1 or 2 above.

FAQs

How do I get Google to recrawl my site?

For a few pages, use URL Inspection in Search Console: inspect the URL, run a live test, then click Request indexing. For many pages, update the lastmod dates in your sitemap and submit it again in the Sitemaps report.

Does resubmitting a sitemap make Google recrawl it?

It makes Google read the sitemap again soon, and Google then recrawls the URLs whose lastmod dates changed, in its own order. Resubmitting an unchanged sitemap does nothing extra, since Google already rereads sitemaps on its own schedule.

How often does Google recrawl sites on its own?

It depends on the page. Homepages and frequently updated pages are recrawled within days; deep, rarely changed pages can wait months. On our own site, the median page had last been crawled 42 days earlier.

Does Google recrawl pages that are already indexed?

Yes. Google keeps recrawling indexed pages to check for changes; the Refresh share in the Crawl stats report shows how much of its crawling goes to known URLs. You can ask for a recrawl of an indexed page through URL Inspection the same way as for a new one.

How do I get Bing to recrawl my site?

Send the changed URLs with IndexNow, which Bing and the other participating engines support, or submit them in Bing Webmaster Tools. Keeping your sitemap's lastmod accurate helps Bing as well.