Inspection Census and Sampling

The budget

Google allows 2,000 URL Inspection calls per Search Console property per day. Indexation reserves a budget per property (default 1,800, editable in settings) and spends it evenly across the day — never in bursts. A full census of a large library takes as long as the library size divided by the daily budget, which is why there is a sampling mode.

Priority order

Each check goes to, in order:

1. Sample — templates with an unmet sample target (random no-impression pages).
2. Weekly re-check — a fixed set of checked pages per template, re-checked weekly so the index-rate trend has a consistent basis.
3. Decaying pages — pages that had impressions in the previous window but none in the current one, oldest last impression first. A check tells "still indexed, no longer ranking" apart from dropped from the index.
4. Census — never-checked pages with no impressions ever, in random order, round-robin across templates. (Random order is what makes the checked subset a fair sample of the rest.)
5. Inferred — pages with impressions only before both windows; assumed indexed until checked.
6. Proxy check — 50 random serving pages per template. Serving pages are treated as indexed because Google only shows indexed pages; this measures how often that assumption holds and is reported on the Indexation page.

Start a sample

Check a sample sets a per-template target (default 500). Those URLs are checked first; a template counts as done when its checked count reaches the target or every one of its no-impression URLs has been checked, whichever is smaller. When every template is done the index rate carries a tight band. 500 per template gives roughly ±4 points at 95% confidence. A sample is a budget allocation, not a separate pipeline: the census simply continues afterwards.

Adding throughput

A URL can be inspected through any verified property that contains it. Verifying url-prefix properties (for example https://example.com/listings/ca/) in Search Console under the same Google account, then clicking Sync from Search Console in settings, adds 1,800 inspections per day for just those URLs. The settings dialog lists where the uninspected backlog sits so you can choose prefixes that help. A property only helps the templates whose URLs it contains.

Quota and failures

If Google reports the quota exhausted, the property sits out the rest of the day and resumes tomorrow. Reserved calls that were not made are simply not spent. A job that is interrupted (deploy, restart) resumes from its checkpoint without re-spending quota. Job failures and incomplete weekly snapshots are emailed to the platform owner.

Cross-checking with Search Console

The Pages report has no API, but it can be filtered by sitemap. Once a verified domain property is synced, each template's page links to the Pages report for the child sitemaps that hold its URLs, so Google's aggregate count can be compared with the numbers here.