Validation details

Here is an overview of the validation process after you click Validate Fix for an issue. This process can take several days or even longer, and you will receive progress notifications by email.

1. When you click Validate Fix, Search Console immediately checks a few pages.
   • If the current instance exists in any of these pages, validation ends, and the validation state remains unchanged.
   • If the sample pages do not have the current error, validation continues with state Started. If validation finds other unrelated issues, these issues are counted against that other issue type and validation continues.
2. Search Console works through the list of known URLs affected by this issue. Only URLs with known instances of this issue are queued for recrawling, not the whole site. Search Console keeps a record of all URLs checked in the validation history, which can be reached from the issue details page.
3. When a URL is checked:
   1. If the issue is not found, the instance validation state changes to Passing. If this is the first instance checked after validation has started, the issue validation state changes to Looking good.
   2. If the URL is no longer reachable, the instance validation state changes to Other (which is not an error state).
   3. If the instance is still present, issue state changes to Failed and validation ends. If this is a new page discovered by normal crawling, it is considered another instance of this existing issue.
4. When queued URLs have been checked for this issue and found to be fixed of this issue, the issue state changes to Passed. However, even when all instances have been fixed, the severity label of the issue doesn't change (Error or Warning), only the number of affected items (0).

Even if you never click Start validation Google can detect fixed instances of an issue. If Google detects that all instances of an issue have been fixed during its regular crawl, it will change the issue count to 0 on the report.

⚠️ Wait for a validation cycle to complete before requesting another cycle, even if you have fixed some issues during the current cycle.

To restart a failed validation:

1. Navigate into the validation log for the failed validation: Open to the issue details page of the issue that failed validation and click See details.
2. Click Start new validation.
3. Validation will restart for all URLs marked Pending or Failed, plus any new instances of this issue discovered through normal crawling since the last validation attempt. URLs marked Passed or Other are not rechecked.
4. Validation typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer, so please be patient.

The following validation states apply to validation for a given issue:

• Not started: One or more instances of this issue have never been in a validation request for this issue.
  Next steps:
  1. Click into the issue to learn the details of the error. Inspect the individual pages to see examples of the error on the live page.
  2. Click Learn more on the details page to see the details of the problem.
  3. Click an example URL row in the table to get details on that specific error.
  4. Fix your pages and then click Validate fix to start validation. Validation typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer, so please be patient.
• Started: You have begun a validation attempt and no remaining instances of the issue have been found yet.
  Next step: Google will send notifications as validation proceeds, telling you what to do, if necessary.
• Looking good: You started a validation attempt, and all issue instances that have been checked so far have been fixed.
  Next step: Nothing to do, but Google will send notifications as validation proceeds, telling you what to do.
• Passed: All known instances of the issue are gone (or the affected URL is no longer available). You must have clicked Validate fix to get to this state (if instances disappeared without you requesting validation, state would change to N/A).
  Next step: Nothing more to do.
• N/A: Google found that the issue was fixed on all URLs, even though you never started a validation attempt.
  Next step: Nothing more to do.
• Failed: A certain threshold of pages still contain this issue, after you clicked Validate.
  Next steps: Fix the issue and restart validation.

After validation has been requested, every instance of the issue is assigned one of the following validation states:

• Pending: Queued for validation. The last time Google looked, this issue instance existed.
• Passed: [Not available in all reports] Google checked for the issue instance and it no longer exists. Can reach this state only if you explicitly clicked Validate for this issue instance.
• Failed: Google checked for the issue instance and it's still there. Can reach this state only if you explicitly clicked Validate for this issue instance.
• Other: [Not available in all reports] Google couldn't reach the URL hosting the instance, or (for structured data) couldn't find the item on the page any more. Considered equivalent to Passed.

Note that the same URL can have different states for different issues; For example, if a single page has both issue X and issue Y, issue X can be in validation state Passed and issue Y on the same page can be in validation state Pending.