There is a comforting lie that SEOs tell themselves when they see the dreaded “Crawled - currently not indexed” status in Google Search Console (GSC). The lie is: “My content just needs to be better.”
We audit the page. We add more H2s. We add a video. We “optimize” the meta description. And then we wait. And it stays not indexed.
The uncomfortable truth of 2025 is that indexing is no longer a meritocracy of quality; it is a calculation of marginal utility. Google is not rejecting your page because it is “bad.” Google is rejecting your page because indexing it costs more in electricity and storage than it will ever generate in ad revenue.
The Economics of the Token
To understand why your page is in purgatory, you must stop thinking like an editor and start thinking like a cloud architect.
Every URL in the index consumes resources:
- Storage: The HTML, the rendered DOM, and the associated vectors must be stored on a shard.
- Refresh: The scheduler must revisit the URL periodically to check for updates.
- Inference: When a user queries, the index must be traversed.
In the Agentic Era, the web has expanded exponentially, but Google’s data centers have only expanded linearly. The math implies a hard cap. We call this the Indexing Threshold.
The Threshold Matrix
When Googlebot crawls a page, it doesn’t just read the text. It assigns a Predicted Utility Score (PUS). If that score falls below the current Threshold, the page is discarded—regardless of how “high quality” the writing is.
| Signal | Traditional “Quality” View | Economic “Utility” View |
|---|---|---|
| Word Count | “Longer is better” | “Longer = more tokens to store = higher cost” |
| Unique Content | “Must be unique” | “Must provide Information Gain > 0.05” |
| External Links | “Votes of confidence” | “Proof of demand path” |
| Internal Links | “Site architecture” | “Orphaned pages constitute stranded capital” |
The “Crawled - Not Indexed” status is simply the system saying: “I have processed this asset, calculated its PUS, and determined it is ROI-negative for our infrastructure.”
Why Authority is the only Proxy that Matters
The prompt typically suggests that authority is about “trust.” I argue it is about risk mitigation.
For Google, indexing a page from a Domain Authority (DA) 10 site is high-risk. The probability of that page answering a query better than the top 10 results is low. The probability of it being spam is high.
Indexing a page from a DA 80 site is low-risk. Even a mediocre page on nytimes.com is likely to get clicked.
Therefore, the “Crawled - Not Indexed” bucket is essentially a Quarantine Zone for Low-Authority Assets. It is not a waiting room; it is an incinerator.
The “Soft 404” of the Mind
Google often conflates “Crawled - Not Indexed” with “Discovered - Currently Not Indexed.” But the distinction is vital. “Crawled” means they spent the compute to render it. They saw it. They understood it. And they chose to ignore it.
This is arguably worse than not being crawled. It is an explicit rejection of value.
Implementation: How to Force the Index
If you are stuck in this state, “improving content” is rarely the fix. You need to improve the Economic Signal of the URL.
- Consolidate: Kill 5 “Crawled - Not Indexed” pages and merge them into one. You are increasing the token density and reducing Google’s storage cost. They are more likely to index one high-density asset than 5 fragments.
- Inject External Demand: Build a link. Not for “juice,” but to prove to the scheduler that this URL is a node in a larger graph. An external link is a signal that “Human compute has already validated this.”
- API Submission: Use the Google Indexing API (if applicable) or IndexNow. While officially for job postings/broadcast events, the push signal forces a prioritization recalculation.
Stop taking it personally. It’s just economics. Your page didn’t fail the quality test; it failed the P&L test.