An interesting look at which pages Google started deindexing in late May, 2025

Many SEOs are noticing that Google is indexing less content since late May, 2025.

I have access to a bunch of sites in GSC and thought it would be interesting to see what patterns I could find.

In most cases, there is a drop in inedexed pages that starts on May 27, 2025. These are screenshots from my own site:

And in most cases, you can see an increase in pages listed as crawled-currently not indexed.

In the majority of the cases I looked at, this issue does not appear to have affected clicks.

It should be noted that many of the sites in my GSC profiles have no issues with indexing and no increase in crawled, currently not indexed pages.

What types of pages are being deindexed?

After looking at about 40 different sites, it seems that the pages being deindexed are ones that Google would be unlikely to serve to people in Search anymore. They are in some cases, old blog posts. In many cases they are thin pages or pages that simply paraphrase information written elsewhere on the web without adding anything of original value.

For my site I see many of my old episodes of my newsletter have been removed from the index.  These are posts from years ago.

Also removed were:

• Notes on Google help hangouts from 2018
• A post about a “new” confusing unnatural links message Google was sending out 12 years ago
• Some thin category pages that were not at all useful

Examples from other sites

Supplement site - They went from 27,000 indexed pages down to 15,000. Wow. They previously had 8000 crawled, not indexed pages. Now they have 15,000. Crawled, currently not indexed, shows many legitimate product pages that are listed in this list. However, when I inspect these pages, Google tells me they are indexed. Could the reporting perhaps be a bug in this case?

It should be noted that these pages have almost no original content on them. No reviews. Nothing proprietary at all. These products are sold on many sites. If I want to buy them from this particular store, they are still indexed for "store name + product", but they do not rank for these products without their brand name.

Local Service business - 20% of their pages were listed as no longer indexed. It seems to me that many of these pages are ones that are either AI written, or essentially are rewriting things others have written many times across the web. Many category pages that were lists of articles were removed as well. Once again though, if I look specifically for these pages in Google’s index I can find them. They don’t appear to be de-indexed, but rather, not ranking.  

These pages do show sporadic ranking post May 27, even though Google has them listed in crawled - not currently indexed. For the pages I looked at, they had very few clicks.

Travel site: In this case, many blog posts were in the crawled, currently not indexed list. In this site’s case, these posts were indeed truly deindexed from what I can see.

Some of the pages were very old blog posts. Some were recent within the last year, but seemed to me to simply paraphrase content that has been written about many times around the web. Google added the word “paraphrased” 22 times in the most recent update of the quality rater guidelines. I think it’s possible that this great de-indexing we are seeing could be an attempt to reduce the amount of unoriginal content in Google’s index.

Once again though, this site has no decrease in clicks to their site.

Recipe site: Many recent blog posts were deindexed, and in this case, I verified that yes, they were completely removed from the index. These posts included a number of “definition” type posts like, “what is the difference between x and y,” and many other simple answer type questions that would be easy for AI Overviews or AI Mode to answer. In this case there does seem to be a noticeable drop in clicks since May 27.

Attorney site: Once again, several blog posts were deindexed. Some were very thin case studies with no interesting information, just vague text. Some were clearly written for the sake of SEO such as posts with vague tips on how to be a better driver, or tips for preventing a truck accident. Once again, these posts were essentially paraphrasing what other sites have said and had no uniquely interesting information.

How to check your pages

Go to Search Console and click on Pages. Click on Not Indexed to deselect those and only see indexed pages. Do you have an obvious drop starting on May 27?

Next, see if you can tell what bucket those pages are in:

Most likely you’ll see them under “crawled, currently not indexed.” This means Google has crawled your page, but has decided to remove it from the index.

Please note that every site has pages in here. I am not too worried if I see paginated pages or /feed pages in this list, unless you’re a massive site with millions of pages that needs to worry about crawl budget. However, if you are seeing pages that you published with the intention of having them in Google’s index, this is a cause for concern.

Does this mean your site is low quality?

Having pages crawled but not indexed can potentially be a sign of low quality. The good news is that Google’s guide to their ranking systems tells us that their systems are designed to work on the page level. I think it’s quite possible that they’ve simply determined that these pages are quite unlikely to get search visitors and therefore they have removed them from the index. They do say, however, that there are some site-wide signals they use. We do not know if having a large number of pages crawled but not indexed contributes to overall site quality.

Here’s what I think:

• If most of the pages in your crawled, currently not indexed list are feed pages or paginated pages, I would not be too worried (unless you have millions of pages, in which case work could be done to improve how Google crawls your site.)
• If most of these pages are old blog posts that once were valuable, but rarely are visited today, I would not worry about these either. I do not think you need to go and remove old posts.
• There is a possibility this is a bug for some sites as in some cases pages marked as crawled not indexed were indeed indexed.
• If a good number of these pages are pages you published primarily for the sake of SEO, then this is a wake-up call.
• Look at the pages that are crawled but not indexed. Do they have content that is truly unique, original and insightful? Or are you just paraphrasing information from around the web? I believe what we're seeing today is just the start of Google cleaning up the web of this type of content.

How do you know if pages were published for SEO? Ask yourself if you would have published these pages even if Google did not exist. Would you have taken the effort to publish them for your existing audience?

If this is the case I would recommend considering a content audit and improving content so that it is original, unique and insightful. This is the first thing listed in Google's documentation on creating helpful content. Also, newly published documentation from Google emphasizes the need for focusing on unique, valuable content for people.

Final thoughts

This was an interesting issue that I wanted to investigate but this is by no means a comprehensive review of the issue happening with sites seeing a reduction in indexed pages.

In most cases I reviewed, there was no reduction in clicks. It seems that Google was simply removing pages that would rarely be chosen from Search.

In some cases, the pages removed were ones that clearly were written for SEO purposes only. If you think this is the case for your site, it likely is worthwhile doing a blog cleanup to ensure that your content is something you would happily send your customers and audience to because of its unique insight and not just filler created for the sake of having content.

I’ll leave comments open on this post. If you have any insight to add, please do so!

Updated June 6

John Mueller was asked about this and said this was not an issue on Google's side,

"...from looking at other examples, I don't see an issue. We don't index all content, and what we index can change over time."

Recently, Google's Martin Splitt said regarding pages that fall out of the index,

"That means that we thought they might be good but we found that users don't really use them in search results. So we thought like, yeah, okay, we gave it a chance but, ehh, you know others are doing better here."

My thought is that this is indeed Google working as it should. It does seem coincidental that so many sites had pages drop out of the index on the same day. My guess is that Google got better at determining which pages were ones that people would be likely to engage with.