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Check your site yourself with free tools

What URL Inspection, the page indexing report and the Rich Results Test each tell you, what they can't, and the checks to do in a browser.

By Metryn · Updated 16 October 2026 · 4 min read

You don't need paid tools to find out what Google sees. These are the free ones that answer the most useful questions, and what each one can't tell you.

Google Search Console

Free, and the closest thing to Google's own view of your site. Verify your domain, and then three parts are worth your time.

PartWhat it tells youWhat it doesn't
URL InspectionWhether a URL is in the index, the crawled HTML and headers, the Google-selected canonical, and the result of a live testWhether the page actually appears for any search, or manual actions and quality issues
Page indexing reportWhy pages aren't indexed, in Google's own statusesA fix. Some statuses have none and need you to improve the page
SitemapsWhich sitemaps Google read and what it foundA guarantee that everything listed is crawled or indexed

A detail from Google's documentation worth remembering: "URL is on Google" means the page is eligible to appear in results, not that it will. And the live test can show whether a page can be indexed, but it doesn't confirm that it is, and it can't predict which canonical Google will select.

Rich Results Test

Google names it, together with URL Inspection, as the tool that catches most technical structured data errors. Quality issues need a human. The rule that trips people up is that markup must represent what's visible on the page. Marking up content users can't see can lead to a manual action, which removes rich result eligibility, and valid markup enables a rich result without ensuring it appears.

Your own browser

  • View source (not the inspector) to see what the server sent, and search it for noindex, canonical and your JSON-LD.
  • Open /robots.txt and /sitemap.xml on every hostname you run.
  • Turn JavaScript off in the site settings and check the page is still readable.

What none of these show

Whether an AI assistant's crawler can reach you. Search Console reflects Google. For OpenAI, Perplexity and others, the evidence is your robots.txt and your server or CDN logs filtered by their user-agent names. That's the part most people skip, and it's what Metryn's scan automates: robots.txt rules for the main AI crawlers, plus sitemap and structured data checks, in one pass.

Questions people ask

How long until Search Console shows data?

The page indexing report reflects what Google has crawled, so a brand-new property can take some time. If you want a quick look at a single URL, URL Inspection reports on it directly.

Does 'URL is on Google' mean I rank?

No. Google says it means the page is eligible to appear in results, not that it will.

Is the live test the same as the indexed version?

No. The live test fetches the page in real time and checks whether it can be indexed. The indexed version reflects Google's most recent crawl. It can't predict which canonical Google will select.

What can't Search Console tell me?

It reflects Google. It doesn't show whether other crawlers, such as OpenAI's or Perplexity's, can reach you. For that you need robots.txt rules and your server logs, or a scan that checks them.

What to do this week

  • Verify your domain property in Search Console.
  • Submit your sitemap.
  • Inspect your five most important URLs and read the crawled HTML.
  • Run the Rich Results Test on one product or article page.

Check your own site

Paste your address below. The free scan looks at robots.txt, your sitemap, access for the main AI crawlers and structured data, and shows what it found in seconds. It tells you what a machine can fetch and read. It doesn't predict rankings or citations.

Free scan · No account needed · Results in seconds

Sources

Keep reading

Want to check one file yourself? Try the free AI crawler robots.txt checker or the llms.txt validator, or read how the score is built.