The video indexing report shows how many videos on your site are eligible for video features on Google Search, and provides reasons why other videos on your site couldn't be indexed.
- About the report
- Using the report
- Explanation of report values:
- Troubleshooting
About the report
The report shows the following information:
- How many indexed pages on your site contain a video that Google has indexed (and details about the indexed video).
- How many indexed pages on your site contain a video Google didn't index (and why not).
Chart totals might not show the total number of unique videos indexed on your site for the following reasons:
- Your site has multiple videos per page
- Your site embeds the same video on multiple pages
- Google couldn’t identify if there was a video on your page
The report covers only indexed pages. If a page is not indexed for any reason (including being a non-canonical page) then it won't appear in this report.
Using the report
At first glance
- The (Video indexed + No video indexed) total should approximately equal the number of pages with videos on your site.
- A lower than expected (Video indexed + No video indexed) total indicates that Google is having problems indexing the pages that contain videos.
- A high No video indexed count indicates video indexing issues (not page indexing issues). See Video is not indexed.
- Troubleshoot for why Google isn't finding, or indexing the videos or pages.
Diving deeper
To see data about videos that are indexed, click View data about indexed video pages on the main page of the report.
Investigate reasons videos weren’t indexed
- Click into a specific reason (such as "Invalid thumbnail size") to show a list of pages with that reason.
- Click a page in the examples table to see information about the video found on that page.
- Read about video indexing errors and troubleshooting to learn more.
Investigate videos on a specific page
To investigate a specific URL on your site, use the URL Inspection report. If a video was found on the page you will see a Video indexing section in the URL inspection results. If no videos were detected on the page, there will not be a Video indexing section.
Explanation of report values
Page status
An indexed page where Google discovered a video can have one of the following statuses:
- No video indexed Google detected that the page has at least one video on it, but Google could not index any of the videos on the page for some reason. Read the Video indexing requirements or troubleshooting guide to learn more. Information about only one video can be shown in the report, even if multiple videos were found.
- Video indexed Google was able to index the page as well as a video on that page. Google indexes only one video per page. Read the Video indexing details to learn more about how Google indexes videos on your site.
Filter by sitemap
You can filter the report to show only page URLs that are present in a selected sitemap. Filtering by sitemap filters all data in the report: the chart, chart totals, reason list, and exports.
When filtering by sitemap, the report shows only indexed page URLs from the selected sitemap where a video was found by Google. The filter ignores the presence or absence of video sitemap tags. Therefore, the resulting URL list omits sitemap URLs that were not indexed, and includes indexed URLs that don't have any video sitemap tags but where a video was found.
You can filter only by sitemaps listed in robots.txt for your site or submitted using the Sitemaps report.
Impressions
You can see how many impressions your video had in Google Search (both the combined results and the video-only search results) as well as in Discover. Results in the Video indexing report are aggregated by page. Use the impression count line in the chart as a general guide rather than an exact count because of the subtleties* in calculating these values.
Video indexing reasons
The Video indexing report exposes the following reasons that a video can't be indexed:
| Reason | Description |
|---|---|
| Video isn't on a watch page |
The video doesn't seem to be on a watch page. A watch page's main purpose is to show a user a single video; only videos that are on a watch page are eligible for indexing. Here are some examples of page types where the video is supplementary to the textual content, and not a watch page:
For more details, learn how to create a dedicated watch page. If you're sure your page is designed to focus on a single video, use the URL inspection tool to check to make sure the video is showing up in the rendered HTML. Try moving the video container to a higher position in the HTML. If you’re using a paywall, add structured data for paywalled content to prevent crawl issues. |
| Cannot determine video position and size | The video player is not present in the page when loaded. Typically this occurs when the page has an image where the player will appear (often a screenshot or an image of the player) that must be clicked to start playback. To fix, load the video player at its actual size and position when the page is loaded, without requiring any user interaction. |
| MRSS failure; try using schema.org instead | You are using MRSS (media RSS) to describe the video, and Google had a problem processing the description. Try using schema.org markup instead to describe your video. |
| No thumbnail URL provided |
No thumbnail image was specified for this video, and Google was unable to generate one for you. Provide a link to a thumbnail for your video using structured data, a sitemap, or an mRSS file. If you provided a thumbnail URL using structured data and got this error, check that you are not defining a different thumbnail URL for the same video in an HTML tag. You should provide the same title, thumbnail URL, and video URL in all sources (sitemap, HTML tags, meta tags, and structured data) that describe the same video on the same page. |
| Unsupported thumbnail format | The thumbnail image specified is in an unsupported format, based on the thumbnail file extension. Make sure to use only supported image formats for your thumbnail image, and to specify the proper format extension. |
| Invalid thumbnail size | The thumbnail specified was an invalid size, and Google was unable to generate a thumbnail for you. Provide a thumbnail of a supported size. |
| Thumbnail blocked by robots.txt | The thumbnail provided is blocked to Google by a robots.txt rule. If the image is hosted on another site, contact the site to see how you can unblock your image, or else provide a link to a thumbnail image that can be reached by Google without any login requirements and not blocked by robots.txt rules. |
| Thumbnail is transparent | The thumbnail provided has a transparency level that exceeds the acceptable threshold: at least 80% of the image must have an alpha level above 250. Transparent thumbnails are not allowed for video indexing. |
| Thumbnail could not be crawled due to hostload | Your site seems to be at maximum capacity for Google crawling requests. Google can't access the video thumbnail needed for indexing until your traffic load (as estimated by Google) drops. For more details, read the crawl budget documentation. |
| Thumbnail could not be reached | Google was unable to access the provided thumbnail at the URL provided. (This is not a robots.txt issue.) Perhaps the image is password protected, or no longer exists at the URL provided. |
| Video not processed | Google detected that the page has at least one video on it, but decided not to index the video. Learn more about using stable URLs to prevent crawl issues. |
| Video not processed yet | The video is being processed; check back in a few days to see if processing is complete. Learn more about using stable URLs to prevent crawl issues. |
| Video not found on host service | The specified video is missing from the hosting service, or is on a private hosting service that isn't reachable by Google's crawler. Visit the service using the video ID to confirm, and then update your page with the proper ID or URL for your video hosting service. |
| Invalid thumbnail | The thumbnail is invalid for some reason not covered by any other thumbnail error listed here. Confirm that you have specified a thumbnail image, that it's following all the guidelines for thumbnails, and that it is available to Google. |
Last crawled
The Last crawled date in the issue details page is the last time the page was crawled, not the video was crawled.
Additional details about the selected video
Click a page URL in the report to see additional video indexing information for that page. This information comes from various sources. If there are multiple distinct videos on the page, all information is about the most likely candidate for indexing, whether or not the video was actually indexed.
- Video URL: The URL of the video file or player. If you see multiple URLs listed for a single video, that means that Google thinks all these URLs are essentially the same video. If you think that these duplicate URLs are actually different videos, you can try to disambiguate them. If Google has found multiple unrelated videos on a page, the additional information shown is associated with the video most eligible for indexing (whether or not it has or can be indexed). A video can be hosted on a different domain and still show details in this report. Read more.
- Thumbnail URL: URL of the thumbnail for this video. This is either a thumbnail provided by you, or a frame extracted by Google from the video file. If a thumbnail can't be found or generated, then the video can't be indexed.
- Is on a watch page?: Whether or not the page is considered to be a watch page. Possible values:
- Yes: The page content is mainly a single video. It doesn't seem to have much additional content.
- No: The page contains other meaningful content in addition to the video, such as additional text, graphics, or additional videos.
Source of video details data
Video details come from the following sources:
- Structured data: The metadata came from schema.org structured data on the page. Typically this is a Video object.
- Sitemap: Information comes from a video tag in a sitemap.
- Open Graph Protocol: Information was provided using Open Graph Protocol tags on the page.
- HTML tag: Information was provided by using one of the many HTML tags that can provide this information, including object tag <embed>, <video>, <link>, <script>, <amp-video> or other 3rd-party-specific AMP video tags for video, or various image tags for thumbnails.
- mRSS: Information was provided in an mRSS file.
- Google-rendered screenshot: Google was able to process the video file and generate a thumbnail from the video source.
- Generated by Google: Google was able to generate this information based on the files and information provided on the page.
- Provided by video hosting platform: The thumbnail was provided by the video hosting platform.
- Metadata source unknown: Search Console is unsure which method was used to obtain the information.
- video tag poster attribute: The thumbnail image link was retrieved from the
<video poster="...">attribute.
If Google identifies a page as having a video but cannot find a video URL, you will see N/A for the URL in the report. To fix, provide the video URL in either contentURL or embedURL in the VideoObject markup; in appropriate HTML tags; or in a video sitemap entry.
Multiple URLs for the same video
If you see multiple URLs listed for a single video, that means that Google has found multiple URLs on the page that point to what Google thinks is the same video.
When this happens, Google might combine and use video metadata associated with any duplicate URLs; for example, the title from URL 1, the thumbnail from URL 2, and so on.
If you think the videos are not the same, read how to fix this issue.
Validate your fixes
Why validate
Telling Google that you have fixed all issues in a specific issue status or category has the following benefits:
- You'll get an email when Google has confirmed your fix on all URLs, or conversely, if Google has found remaining instances of that issue.
- You can track Google's progress in confirming your fixes, and see a log of all pages queued for checking, and the fix status of each URL.
It might not always make sense to fix and validate a specific issue on your website: for example, URLs blocked by robots.txt are probably intentionally blocked. Use your judgment when deciding whether to address a given issue.
You can also fix issues without validating; Google updates your instance count whenever it crawls a page with known issues, whether or not you explicitly requested fix validation.
Start validation
To tell Search Console that you fixed an issue:
- Fix all instances of the issue on your site. If you missed a fix, validation will stop when Google finds a single remaining instance of that issue.
- Open the issue details page of the issue that you fixed. Click the issue in the issues list in your report.
- ⚠️ If you are filtered to a specific sitemap in your report, the validation will apply only to items in the sitemap at the time you requested validation. This might be what you want, or it might not. Just be aware of it.
- Click Validate fix. Do not click Validate fix again until validation has succeeded or failed. More details about how Google checks your fixes.
- You can monitor the validation progress. Validation typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer, so please be patient. You will receive a notification when validation succeeds or fails.
- If validation fails, you can see which URL caused the validation to fail by clicking See details in the issue details page. Fix this page, confirm your fix on all URLs in Pending state, and restart validation.
When is an issue considered "fixed" for a URL or item?
An issue is marked as fixed for a URL or item when either of the following conditions are met:
- When the URL is crawled and the issue is no longer found on the page. For an AMP tag error, this can mean that you either fixed the tag or that the tag has been removed (if the tag is not required). During a validation attempt, it will be labeled Passed.
- If the page is not available to Google for any reason (page removed, marked noindex, requires authentication, and so on), the issue will be considered as fixed for that URL. During a validation attempt, it is categorized in the Other validation state.
Issue lifetime
An issue's lifetime extends from the first time any instance of that issue was detected on your site until 90 days after the last instance was marked as gone from your site. If ninety days pass without any recurrences, the issue is removed from the issues table.
An issue's First detected date is the first time the issue was detected during the issue's lifetime, and does not change. Therefore:
- If all instances of an issue are fixed, but a new instance of the issue occurs 15 days later, the issue is marked as open, and first detected date remains the original date.
- If the same issue occurs 91 days after the last instance was fixed, the previous issue was closed, and so this is recorded as a new issue, with the first detected date set to the new detection date.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- When a URL is checked:
- 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.
- If the URL is no longer reachable, the instance validation state changes to Other (which is not an error state).
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- Click Start new validation.
- 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.
- Validation typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer, so please be patient.
See validation progress
To see the progress of a current validation request, or the history of the last request if a validation is not in progress:
- Open the issue details page for the issue. Click the issue row in the main report page to open the issue details page.
- The validation request status is shown both in the issue details page and also in the Validation row of the Details table.
- Click See details to open the validation details page for that request.
- The instance status for each URL included in the request is shown in the table.
- The instance status applies to the specific issue that you are examining. You can have one issue labeled Passed on a page, but other issues labeled Failed, Pending, or Other on the same page.
- In the AMP report and Page Indexing report, entries in the validation history page are grouped by URL.
- In the Rich Result reports, items are grouped by the combination of URL + structured data item (as determined by the item's Name value).
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:- 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.
- Click Learn more on the details page to see the details of the problem.
- Click an example URL row in the table to get details on that specific error.
- 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.
Troubleshooting
Overview of troubleshooting
In order to troubleshoot a video indexing problem you must understand these key concepts:
- Page indexing
- Google must be able to find and index the page that embeds a video. You can test whether a page is (or can be) indexed using the URL Inspection tool. Requirements for page indexing:
- Google can find the page: either the page is linked from somewhere that Google knows about, or is listed in a sitemap.
- Google can access the page: The page isn't blocked from indexing with a robots.txt rule, noindex rule, or by requiring a login
- The page follows all the Google Search essentials: Google won't index a page that violates the spam policies or can't be indexed for technical reasons.
- The page isn't a duplicate of another page: Google tries to group together any duplicate pages on your site, and will index only one of those pages. If only one of those duplicates has a video, but that is not the indexed page, then Google won't index the video for that page.
- Video indexing
- Google indexes videos only from indexed watch pages. For more details, read the Video indexing requirements.
- Google tries to fetch the video file as part of video indexing. If the file is blocked to Google (some services block Google from fetching a video) or if the file is in an unsupported format, it won't be fetched.
Total video count low / Total page count low
If the total number of Video indexed + No video indexed values is much less than the number of indexed pages with videos on your site, there are two possible reasons:
- Google could not index the page containing a video. A video has no chance of being indexed unless it is within a watch page that is indexed. See Watch page is not indexed.
- Google could not find any videos on your indexed page. Even if Google indexes the page, if it can't find a video on the page, it won't appear in this report. See No video found on page.
Watch page is not indexed
If Google has not indexed a watch page, then the watch page, and any videos it contains, won't be included in this report.
Alternately, if Google has indexed a page but couldn't detect a video on the page, the page won't appear in this report.
You can see a high-level view of how many pages on your site are indexed using the Page Indexing report. See if the number of indexed pages seems right. See if indexing errors apply generally to pages containing videos. Note that the Page Indexing report doesn't provide information on pages that weren't found by Google.
To learn the specifics of why a specific page might not be indexed, use the URL Inspection tool. That tool provides detailed information about whether and why Google can or can't index a page. Some general guidelines:
- Findability issues: Google must be able to find a page in order to index it. Is the page linked by an already indexed page on your site, or another site? Is the page listed in a sitemap?
- Indexing issues: The following page indexing issues can be detected by the URL Inspection tool:
- Page blocked from crawling by robots.txt
- Page blocked from indexing by a noindex tag or directive
- Page is not canonical. Google indexes only canonical pages (duplicates of the canonical are not indexed). Although a video won't be indexed from a non-canonical page, if the same video is embedded within another, canonical indexed page, the video can be indexed from this page.
No video found on page
If Google doesn't find a video on an indexed page, then the page won't appear in this report. (This is different from when Google finds videos on an indexed page but can't index any video. In that case, the page will appear in the report as No video indexed.)
If your page has a video, but when you inspect the page Google does not report a video, here are some recommendations:
- Add video structured data.
- Add the page to a sitemap with a video descriptor.
- Ensure that you follow the best practices for videos.
- Make sure that the watch page is indexed. Even if a live URL inspection detects a video, a video won't be indexed from a page that isn't indexed.
Google is combining video metadata from different locations
If you see multiple URLs for the same video on a page, this means that Google considers them to be the same video.
In this case, Google might use metadata from any of the duplicate sources--for example, the title from URL1 and the thumbnail from URL2.
If you think that these videos are not the same, here's how to help Google differentiate your videos:
- Make sure that each video has a unique video and thumbnail URL.
- If you are using schema.org Video objects, make sure that your Video object URL matches the URL used in HTML tags (<embed>, <video>, or other appropriate tag), sitemaps, and mRSS files.
- Do not use the same thumbnail for different videos.
Video is not indexed
A video might not be indexed for many reasons, including:
- The watch page is not indexed. Use the URL Inspection tool to determine if a page is indexed, and if not, why not.
- The video doesn't follow all the video indexing requirements.
- The video isn't findable by Google. Google can't index a video if it can't find it on the page. Does the page require user interaction to see the video? Use the URL Inspection tool to test the live page and look at the screenshot--can you see your video on the page?
- The page isn't a watch page. In order to be eligible for video indexing, the main reason a user visits this page must be to watch that video. For more details, learn how to create a dedicated watch page.
- Google couldn't retrieve the thumbnail supplied or generate a thumbnail. To supply a thumbnail, follow these guidelines. To enable Google to generate a file, see video fetching. You can use the Rich Results Test tool to test for robots.txt blocking:
- Open the Rich Results test
- Provide the URL of the thumbnail and click Test URL
- In the results, expand the Crawl section and check the Crawl allowed? result, which should indicate whether the thumbnail is blocked by a robots.txt rule.
- If a robots.txt rule is blocking your thumbnail, you'll need to contact whoever owns the file (the owner for the site containing the thumbnail) and tell them to unblock your thumbnail file to Google in the robots.txt file.
- Google couldn't generate required information for the video for some reason (thumbnail is required). If the video uses structured data, is the structured data correct? Invalid or missing values for required structured data attributes can prevent a video from being indexed. You can test your video structured data using the Rich Results Test tool.
How to block a page or video from the index
To block a page containing a video from appearing in Search results, add a noindex tag or directive to the containing page. This should also prevent any videos on the page from being indexed in the context of that page. If the videos appear in other, indexed pages, the videos could be indexed there; if the videos don't appear in any other pages on your site, they won't be indexed.
To block only a video from appearing in Search results, you must return a noindex directive in requests for both the video or the thumbnail image (if any) for the video. Simply not returning video bytes for a crawling request won't prevent a video from appearing in Search, since Google can index a video even without a successful fetch of the video file.
Read more advanced blocking or restriction guidelines.
Unanswerable questions
Here are some video statistics that we currently can't supply in Search Console:
- How many videos on my site has Google indexed?
Search Console currently doesn't have a report showing the total number of unique indexed videos on a site, only a count of indexed pages containing a video that can or can't be indexed. - What videos can/can't Google index?
Search Console doesn't have a comprehensive report showing all videos that can or cannot be indexed on a site, only pages containing a video that can or cannot be indexed. - What page(s) is video X indexed for?
Search Console doesn't have a way to see all indexed pages associated with a given indexed video.
* Very specific conditions mentioned above means that your site has watch pages that have only a single, unique video per page, and Google can index every watch page that contains a video. In this case, the report will reflect the count of videos on your site. If your site embeds the same video on multiple pages, or Google can't index every page with a video, then the chart totals probably won't show the total number of unique videos indexed on your site.
