Inside GATE: the go/no-go checks before you press Request indexing

Short answer: Request indexing in Search Console is limited, and it can't fix a page that is telling Google "no". GATE checks up to 20 URLs the way Googlebot would meet them, in a fixed order. Each one comes back GO or NO-GO, with the single reason that blocks it and the fix. If it's a GO, it also gives you soft notes worth a look before you spend the request.

The quick usage guide is at GATE: how it works. This piece is the decision tree.

What you paste in

URLs, one per line, up to 20 per run. Duplicates and anything without http or https are dropped before the check starts.

The decision tree, in order

GATE fetches robots.txt once per host, then fetches the page and follows redirects. The first failure wins:

1. Couldn't prove. The fetch failed or timed out. Re-run before requesting anything.
2. Bad status. The final response isn't 200. Fix the response first.
3. Blocked by robots. The robots.txt rule that applies to Googlebot disallows the path. If there's no Googlebot group, the * group is used. Matching follows Google's rule: the longest matching rule wins, and Allow beats Disallow on a tie. * and $ work as wildcards.
4. noindex on page. The meta robots tag, the googlebot meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header says noindex. Requesting now wastes the shot.
5. Redirects away. The URL you pasted isn't the URL that answered. Request the final URL instead.
6. Canonical points away. The page declares a canonical to a different URL, or to another host or scheme. A missing canonical isn't a fail. A canonical pointing at a different page is.

Pass all six and it's a GO: "Safe to request indexing."

The soft notes on a GO

A GO can still carry a soft note, because ready and good aren't the same thing:

• No title.
• Soft 404 title: a 200 page whose title says "not found", "404", "page unavailable", "no longer available" or "error".
• Thin body: under 400 characters of text once the HTML tags are stripped.

None of these stop the request. They're the things a reviewer, human or not, notices first.

Edge cases

• Trailing slashes and case. URLs are compared after lowercasing the host and dropping the trailing slash and the #fragment. /page/ and /page count as the same page. An http to https hop still counts as a redirect, and the query string still matters.
• An unreadable robots.txt. If robots.txt returns an error other than 404 or 410, GATE can't apply rules. The row shows "robots.txt unreadable" so you know the robots check wasn't proven. A missing robots.txt (404 or 410) means everything is allowed.
• The thin note is a smell, not a word count. It counts every character left once tags are removed, so a page heavy on inline script can look less thin than it reads.

Worked example

https://samplebrand.test/guides/returns
https://samplebrand.test/guides/returns-policy/
http://samplebrand.test/pricing
https://samplebrand.test/blog/old-news

Live: row 1 200, self-canonical
Live: row 2 200, canonical -> /guides/returns
Live: row 3 301 -> https://samplebrand.test/pricing (200)
Live: row 4 200, meta robots noindex

Row 1 is a GO. Row 2 is NO-GO because its canonical points away: request /guides/returns instead (row 1 already covers it). Row 3 is NO-GO on the redirect: request the https URL. Row 4 is NO-GO on noindex. If that page is meant to rank, remove the tag first. That's three wasted requests saved, and one correct one made.

Run it: open GATE

The money angle

Request indexing doesn't cost money. Misusing it costs time, and time is the expensive part. In a recovery, every day a fixed page sits unrecrawled is a day of lost clicks you've already paid to win back.

GATE makes sure the request goes to a page that can actually be indexed. It's the last step I run after fixes during Google penalty recovery, and the one that stops a request being spent on a URL that still says no. Before any of that, start with how to check for a Google penalty.