How to get Google to crawl your Google Site or other websites and improve your search performance

Woman working on laptop — When Google crawls your website, it catalogues any updates, ensuring your site appears in all relevant search results.
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To get Google to crawl your Google Site or personal website after you’ve updated it, you’ll need to submit a request.
Crawling captures and indexes a site at a particular point in time — ensuring that search engines have the most current version of your site.
Google may take a few weeks to crawl your site, but you can check on the status using the Index Coverage report or the URL Inspection tool.
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If you’ve made updates to your Google Site or personal website, you may want to request that Google “crawl” your site.

Crawling is a software process that takes a full snapshot of all the content on a particular webpage. That snapshot is what search engines use to direct users to your site. That means that if you’ve made significant changes to your website, but Google has not yet collected the most recent snapshot, people won’t be directed to your new content.

Recrawling is an automated process, but you can also request that the company re-index your site. There are two ways to ask that Google recrawl your site, a process that can take up to a few weeks, with no significant difference in length between each method. Submitting multiple requests also won’t get your site re-indexed any faster.

Once you’ve submitted the request, Google suggests monitoring the crawling progress using the Index Coverage report or the URL Inspection tool. The URL Inspection Tool is recommended for Google Sites users, and for people who want Google to crawl a handful of individual URLs. If you have a higher number of URLs, submit a sitemap instead.

If you need Google to crawl your updated site, here’s how to do it.

How to get Google to crawl your site

1. Open the Google Search Console.

2. Enter the URL of your Google Site under "URL Prefix."

How to get Google to Crawl your site 1 — Use the URL prefix option to have Google verify where the site is yours.
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3. Verify your site ownership for Google using one of the following listed methods:

HTML file
HTML tag
Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Domain Name Provider

Note: You can't add meta tags or HTML files to new Google Sites, so we suggest signing up for a Google Analytics account for a relatively quick and easy verification process.

4. After completing whichever process you've selected, Google Search Console should confirm your site has been automatically verified.

5. In the confirmation message box, click "Go to property."

6. Choose the "URL Inspector" tool from the left-hand column.

7. Copy and paste the URL of your site into the tool's search box at the top of the page.

How to get Google to crawl your site 2 — The search bar will appear automatically at the top of the URL Inspector page.
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8. Once the search process is complete, click "Test Live URL" in the dashboard's upper-left corner.

How to get Google to crawl your site 3 — This is the step before you can request Google to index your site.
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9. Select "Request Indexing."

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