I spend a lot of time digging into technical glitches, often running automation scripts on my Mac mini to isolate points of failure. Recently, I encountered a confusing issue in Google Search Console where my sitemap status seemed inaccurate, leading me down a rabbit hole of checking HTML sources and API responses.
Why does the sitemap screen show 0 indexed pages?
For several weeks, my sitemaps screen displayed "Submitted: 52" and "Indexed: 0". I had submitted both sitemap.xml and the Tistory-generated rss feed, and both were marked as "Success". It felt like something was broken; I started questioning if my google-site-verification code was missing or if the URLs were incorrect.
To verify, I used the Search Console API to run sitemaps().list(). The results showed 55 items for sitemap.xml and 11 for rss, both returning HTTP 200 status codes. In my automation scripts, a 200 OK signal indicates the process should move to the next step, so technically, everything was working perfectly. Despite this, the sitemap dashboard stubbornly refused to move past 0 indexed pages.
In reality, the "Indexed" count on the sitemap screen is an indirect indicator. It reflects whether the sitemap submission was successful or how Google discovered the files, but it is not a real-time mirror of whether your pages are live in search results. Especially on platforms like Tistory, there is often a lag between the sitemap report and actual indexing. For example, as of September 4, 2026, my Tistory page index report was 12 days behind, even though the content was already live.
How can I verify if a specific URL is actually indexed?
Since the sitemap dashboard was unreliable, I turned to the "URL Inspection" tool in the Search Console top search bar. This is the only way to get a definitive answer for a specific page.
To check your status, copy the full URL of your post—for example, https://yourblog.com/8—and paste it into the URL Inspection box at the top of the console, then hit enter. When I did this for my posts at /8, /18, and /44, the result was clearly "URL is on Google" or "Submitted and indexed."
This confirmed that while the sitemap screen showed 0, my pages were actually indexed and searchable. In one specific check, I found that 13 posts published between September 11 and September 14 were all "Indexed," with the crawl date matching the publication date, even though the sitemap report had not yet updated.
How do I make new posts get indexed faster?
Once I realized the dashboard numbers were misleading, I focused on discovery speed. Google can process multiple sitemaps, and I found that submitting two different types of feeds helps new content get picked up more quickly.
The first is sitemap.xml, the standard full list of posts provided by the blog service. The second is the rss feed (or atom.xml), which serves as a feed for the most recent posts. To set this up, go to the "Sitemaps" menu in Search Console and submit sitemap.xml, then repeat the process for rss. Currently, my rss shows 11 successful items and sitemap.xml shows 55.
If you want to manually push a page, you can use the "Request Indexing" button in the UI. However, this is limited to about 10 requests per day. Google explicitly warns that "submitting multiple times does not change priority," so there is no point in spamming the button. Submitting both sitemap types and verifying via URL Inspection is a much more efficient workflow.
Stop stressing over the numbers on the sitemap screen and simply check your URLs individually.
Originally published at Homelab Notes — notes from one Mac mini running local LLMs and 24/7 automation.
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