If the Request Indexing button is grayed out, not responding, or giving an error, here are the most common reasons:
1. Daily Quota Reached
Google limits indexing requests to approximately 10-12 requests per property per day. If you have submitted multiple URLs, you may have hit this limit. Wait 24 hours and try again.
2. Feature Temporarily Suspended
Google has occasionally suspended or rate-limited this feature globally (as happened in 2022 for an extended period). If the feature is unavailable site-wide, the only alternative is to update your sitemap and wait for Google's regular crawl.
3. Page Has Crawlability Issues
If the URL Inspection tool shows the page is blocked by robots.txt, has a noindex tag, or has other critical errors, Google may not queue it for indexing. Fix the underlying issue first.
What to Do Instead
- Update or resubmit your sitemap
- Build internal links to the page from already-indexed pages
- Build external links pointing to the page