Google Confirms Search Console Indexing Report Glitch Was a "Short Blip"

If you opened Search Console on the evening of 8 September 2026 and found a wall of pages suddenly reclassified as "Crawled - currently not indexed", it was a reporting bug and it has already been fixed.

John Mueller confirmed the issue on Bluesky at around 5:50am on 9 September, describing it as "a short blip that was resolved quickly in the night." He also confirmed that indexing itself was working normally throughout — the fault was confined to how Search Console displayed status, not to whether Google had the pages in its index.

What people saw

The reports started with Glenn Gabe and Matthew Mellinger, who both flagged large numbers of pages abruptly moving into the "Crawled - currently not indexed" bucket. Mellinger described seeing a large number of pages shift at once.

The tell that this was reporting rather than reality: pages showing the not-indexed status were still returning results in Google Search when checked directly. Status in the interface and status in the index had come apart.

By the time Mueller posted his confirmation, affected pages were already showing normal status again.

Why "Crawled - currently not indexed" causes disproportionate panic

Of all the states in the Page Indexing report, this is the one that reliably triggers an emergency. It's the status associated with genuine quality problems — thin content, near-duplicates, pages Google has looked at and decided not to keep. Seeing it appear across a large set of previously indexed URLs reads as a quality judgement, and a sudden one.

That's exactly why a display bug in this particular state is more disruptive than its severity warrants. The rational response to a real version of this event is significant: content audits, consolidation decisions, sometimes emergency client conversations. Triggering that response on bad data costs real time.

Google's own Page Indexing report documentation defines the status narrowly: "The page was crawled by Google but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling." Notably, Google's guidance for a genuine instance of this status is already to wait rather than act immediately — it explicitly says not to resubmit the URL. The panic this status triggers in practice, then, is somewhat at odds with Google's own stated position that a real "crawled, not indexed" result often resolves on its own without intervention. That makes the overnight display bug doubly misleading: it borrowed the visual alarm of a status that even Google treats as provisional rather than urgent.

The practical lesson

Before acting on a dramatic overnight change in Search Console, verify against the index itself. A site: query or a live URL Inspection on two or three affected pages takes under a minute and distinguishes a reporting fault from a real deindexing event. If the pages still return in search, the index is fine and the dashboard is wrong.

This is worth building into your process, because Search Console reporting faults are not rare. This blip lands in the same fortnight as the Links report going a month without refreshing and September data going missing from Business Profile Insights. Search Console's display layer has had a visibly rough few weeks, and none of those three incidents reflected anything wrong with the underlying sites.

A useful default: treat a sudden, large, overnight movement in a Search Console report as suspect until confirmed by a second source. Real ranking and indexing changes rarely arrive as a clean step change across thousands of URLs at 11pm.

Nothing to do

There's no action required here. The bug is resolved, no indexing was lost, and no recovery work is needed. If you took a screenshot of the drop for a client report, it's worth going back and correcting the record before it becomes a data point in someone's monthly deck.

Sources

• John Mueller's confirmation on Bluesky
• Initial reports from Glenn Gabe on X and Matthew Mellinger on LinkedIn
• Google Search Console Help: Page Indexing report — official definition of "Crawled - currently not indexed"