Index checking via API

When an API is worth it

Manual and dashboard checks work for occasional lists. An API becomes useful when index checks are part of a routine: a weekly report on new backlinks, a check after every content release, or a client dashboard that should refresh without someone uploading a file. The API lets those systems submit URLs and read results directly.

What Google's APIs do and do not offer

Two Google APIs come up in this context, and neither is a general index checker.

• Indexing API: Google's quickstart limits it to pages with job-posting or livestream structured data. It is a way to notify Google that such pages were added or removed, not a way to look up status, and it is not intended for ordinary pages or backlinks.
• Search Console URL Inspection API: returns Google's indexed record for a URL, but only for properties you have verified, and it is subject to usage quotas. It mirrors the URL Inspection tool in the Search Console interface.

For URLs on sites you do not control, which covers almost all backlinks, a third-party API that checks live search results is the practical route.

The common request pattern

Most index-check APIs follow a job model, because each URL needs live lookups that cannot all complete within a single HTTP request:

1. Authenticate with an API key, usually sent in a header.
2. Create a job by posting a list of URLs, often with an optional name or callback.
3. Receive a job ID in the response.
4. Wait: poll the job status endpoint at a modest interval, or receive a webhook if supported.
5. Fetch results: a per-URL list with an indexed or not-indexed status and sometimes the date checked.
6. Store the results next to the URL's metadata (campaign, vendor, submission date).

Design notes for clients:

• Deduplicate and normalize URLs before sending, since duplicates usually cost credits.
• Poll slowly. Checks on large lists take minutes or longer; tight loops add load without speeding anything up.
• Treat failures per URL, not per job. A few URLs may error while the rest complete.
• Keep the raw results. Later comparisons between checks are where the value is, as re-check frequency explains.

The IndexChex API

IndexChex provides a REST API whose first version (v1) covers index-check jobs, index-submit jobs and account balance, authenticated with per-user API keys. An index-check job created through the API uses the same checking method as the dashboard: each URL is looked up against live Google results with the bare URL, the quoted URL, site: and inurl:, and counted as indexed if any of them returns it. Checks cost 1 credit per URL, and a job can hold up to 10,000 URLs.

Because the same API also creates submission jobs, a script can check a list, collect the not-indexed URLs and submit them, which is the loop described in from check to resubmission. Endpoint paths, request fields and response formats are documented on the IndexChex API v1 reference; this handbook does not repeat them. A second version mirrors another vendor's schema for migration purposes and is described on the IndexChex index checker page.

Building a check pipeline

A typical automated setup:

The same considerations as bulk index checking apply: one consistent checker as the reference, segmentation by source, and a re-check before treating a miss as final. For a single URL, the manual method on how to check if a URL is indexed is still faster than writing code.