Discovered, currently not indexed.

Discovered is not the same as crawled, and the difference is the diagnosis

These two statuses sit next to each other in the report and get treated as the same problem. They are opposites.

Discovered, currently not indexed means Google found the URL, usually in your sitemap or through a link, and has not requested it. It has never seen the content. Nothing on the page caused this, because nothing on the page has been read.

Crawled, currently not indexed means Google fetched the page, looked at it, and decided against indexing it. That is a verdict on the content. If that is your status, the separate guide for it is the one you want, because the fixes have almost nothing in common.

The practical read: discovered is a queueing problem, crawled is a quality problem. Work out which you have before doing anything, because the wrong fix costs weeks.

Why Google skips the request

There is no single cause, and the honest framing is that Google is rationing. Crawling costs it money, so it estimates what a URL is likely to be worth before spending the request. The common reasons it estimates low:

• The site is new or has little authority. The most common cause by far, and the least discussed. A domain nobody links to gets a small crawl allowance, so a large sitemap on a new site will sit part-crawled for weeks. This is normal rather than broken.
• There are simply too many URLs. Faceted navigation, filters, session parameters, calendars and paginated archives can generate more addresses than your content justifies. Google discovers all of them and prioritises accordingly.
• The pages look like near duplicates from the outside. If the URL pattern resembles pages it has already crawled and found thin, it can decline to fetch more of the same without reading them.
• The server is slow or unreliable. Google backs off when response times climb or errors appear. A site that is slow under crawl load gets crawled less, which is self reinforcing.
• The page is orphaned or nearly so. A URL that exists only in the sitemap, with no internal links pointing at it, carries no signal that you consider it important.

What actually moves it

In rough order of how much difference each makes:

• Internal links from pages that already get crawled. The cheapest and most reliable lever. A URL linked from a page Google visits regularly gets fetched far sooner than one sitting alone in a sitemap. If a page matters, link to it from somewhere that matters.
• Fewer URLs. Removing or blocking the combinations nobody searches concentrates the same crawl allowance on pages that earn. Parameter handling, sensible pagination and not generating a page per filter combination.
• External links. The thing that raises the allowance itself. Slow, but it is the underlying constraint on a new site rather than a workaround for it.
• Faster, steadier responses. Particularly time to first byte under load. Google crawls more when crawling is cheap.
• Genuine differentiation. If a set of pages exists to cover keyword variations rather than to say different things, consolidating them into fewer, better pages usually gets those indexed while the sprawl never would have been.

What wastes your time

• Resubmitting the sitemap. Google has already discovered the URL. That is what the status says. Resubmitting tells it nothing new.
• Request Indexing on hundreds of URLs. It is rate limited, intended for individual pages, and using it at volume does not raise your crawl allowance. It is fine for one important page, useless as a strategy.
• The Indexing API. It is documented for job postings and livestream structured data only. Using it for ordinary pages is not a shortcut, and services selling it as one are describing something Google has repeatedly said does not work.
• Adding more pages. If Google is declining to crawl what you have, publishing more of it does not help and frequently makes the ratio worse.
• Changing the lastmod dates to look fresh. Sitemap dates that move without the content changing are a signal Google learns to discount, and it will discount the accurate ones with them.

How long it should take

On an established site with decent authority, a genuinely new page moves from discovered to indexed in days. On a new domain with no external links, several weeks is normal and a partially crawled sitemap for a month or two is not a fault.

The number worth watching is the ratio rather than the total. If discovered keeps rising while indexed stays flat, you are publishing faster than you are earning the crawl to support it. That is a signal to stop adding and start linking.

The checklist

• Confirm the status is discovered rather than crawled. Different problem, different fix.
• Check the affected URLs are internally linked from somewhere that gets crawled.
• Count how many URLs the site generates against how many pages it genuinely has.
• Check server response time under crawl, not just on an idle test.
• Ask honestly whether the pages differ from each other in a way a reader would notice.
• If the domain is new with no links, accept that the answer is time and external signal, and stop looking for a technical cause.