Seven days after launching this blog I had one page indexed: the homepage. Every post showed "URL is unknown to Google" in GSC's URL Inspection tool. Not crawled and rejected — unknown. Google had never seen them.
The stack was solid. Astro static output, 100 across all Core Web Vitals, real content on every post, sitemap submitted on day one. There was no rendering problem, no thin content problem, no technical issue I could point to.
I knew something was wrong. A site scoring 100 on CWV with real content should at minimum show impressions within a week even with no clicks. No signal at all meant Google wasn't reaching the posts.
What I checked
Pulled index status on every post via the GSC URL Inspection API:
| verdict | last crawled | coverage state | url |
|---|---|---|---|
| PASS | 2026-05-15 | Submitted and indexed | / |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/automating-seo-monitoring-with-ai-agents/ |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/claude-built-my-astro-blog/ |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/connecting-x-api-to-server/ |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/core-web-vitals-astro-case-study/ |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/framer-motion-safari-synthetic-monitoring/ |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/how-to-set-up-local-ai-agent/ |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/lovable-ssr-update/ |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/openclaw-x-skill/ |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/prerender-silent-failure/ |
| NEUTRAL | never | URL is unknown to Google | /posts/why-astro-over-lovable/ |
Homepage indexed, every post never crawled. That pattern points to one thing — Google found the homepage but couldn't discover the content. Either internal links were broken or the sitemap wasn't being processed.
Checked the sitemap submission in GSC:
URL: https://www.tedagentic.com/sitemap.xml
Submitted: 2026-05-13
Downloaded: 2026-05-13
submitted: 37 | indexed: 0
There it is. The sitemap was submitted at https://www.tedagentic.com/sitemap.xml. The site canonicalises to https://tedagentic.com/ — no www. Google downloaded the sitemap once, saw 37 URLs, indexed zero of them, and stopped.
Why this breaks indexing
The sitemap URL and your canonical domain need to match exactly. If your canonical is tedagentic.com but your sitemap is submitted from www.tedagentic.com, Google sees an inconsistency. On an established domain with strong trust signals, it might work through it. On a brand-new domain, the mismatch appeared to stop Google from trusting or prioritising the sitemap URLs entirely.
It's not a warning, not a soft signal. The combination of canonical inconsistency, weak new-domain trust, and sitemap ambiguity silently stalled the entire submission.
The fix
Submit the sitemap at the exact URL the site serves on:
service.sitemaps().submit(
siteUrl='sc-domain:tedagentic.com',
feedpath='https://tedagentic.com/sitemap.xml'
).execute()
GSC downloaded it within minutes. 47 URLs detected. Posts will start getting crawled within days.
What to verify on any new site
Before assuming a crawl delay is just Google being slow, check three things in GSC:
- Sitemap URL matches your canonical domain exactly — www vs non-www, http vs https, trailing slash vs none all count
- Last downloaded date is recent — if Google downloaded your sitemap once on launch day and never again, something is wrong
-
Indexed count is not permanently zero —
submitted: 37, indexed: 0after a week is a hard signal, not a waiting game
A technically clean site should show impressions within a week. If it doesn't, the sitemap submission is the first place to look.
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