Google Search Console Launches URL Inspection API

Google this morning launched a new API for Search Console - the URL Inspection API. This API lets you programmatically interact with the URL Inspection Tool that you would manually interact with within Google Search Console, but with code. SEOs and developers are super excited about this new API - as you'd imagine.

You can access the URL Inspection API over here, the responses you'd get from the API would tell you the index status, AMP, rich results, and mobile usability of any URL you have verified access to in Google Search Console.

There is an API quota that limits you to 2,000 queries per day and 600 queries per minute. So it is not unlimited use and you won't be able to run this API across all your URLs on a daily basis, at least not if your site has a thousands of pages.

I like how Fabrizio Ballarini summed up this on Twitter:

Not more ranking tools and scraping a fake SERP to verify what's indexed. Indexing API has been my most wanted feature for years since we have been launching ton of pages and checking indexing it's so crucial for website owners.

Thanks a lot @googlesearchc for listening 🙏

— Fabrizio Ballarini - Hiring wise.jobs (@Pechnet) January 31, 2022

You can check if blocked by robots or if indexed. This is going to make most crawlers and tools less useful if you can make API calls at scale. What's better than real data from Google.

Same goes for canonicals and other stuff that comes via URL inspection tool. pic.twitter.com/lUr5oAzWp3

— Fabrizio Ballarini - Hiring wise.jobs (@Pechnet) January 31, 2022

I guess at this stage more useful for check on changes vs daily check of indexing at scale across million of URLs which is something we would love to do on component that don't change via CMS.

— Fabrizio Ballarini - Hiring wise.jobs (@Pechnet) January 31, 2022

Indexed yes/no is useful or robots alert yet part of the indexing challenges we face revolve crawl but now indexed when dealing with large websites. Would be really handy to know more before indexing.

That said it's something we can get to if combine server logs.

— Fabrizio Ballarini - Hiring wise.jobs (@Pechnet) January 31, 2022

So have fun with the API, it can be super useful in many cases, I can see this being added to tons of CMS platforms and SEO toolsets in the coming weeks.

Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.