Search Console briefly mislabeled indexed pages as “Crawled, currently not indexed” overnight on September 8 into September 9, and Google says the issue cleared on its own within roughly an hour. John Mueller of Google confirmed the glitch on Bluesky the next morning, calling it a “short blip” that the team traced and resolved before most of the reports even went public. No ranking or indexing behavior actually changed; only the reporting layer briefly showed the wrong status.
The timing explains why so many site owners caught it in the act. SEO consultants Glenn Gabe and Ryan Tree flagged the pattern on X within minutes of each other, both describing homepages that were clearly live in search results but suddenly showing as unindexed in Search Console. Marketer Matthew Mellinger posted LinkedIn data pulled directly from the Search Console API during the affected window, showing up to 20 percent of pages on some smaller sites flipping to the “not indexed” status, concentrated on thinner or older pages.
Mueller’s explanation draws a firm line between a reporting error and an indexing error. “Nothing breaks if indexing is working as expected and it’s just reported differently,” he wrote, adding that he did not consider the episode “particularly critical” since homepage indexing is easy for anyone to double check independently of the dashboard. That is a reasonable technical distinction, and by the time Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz checked his own properties, the numbers had already reverted to normal.
The bug itself was minor and brief, which is exactly why it deserves a narrower read than the alarm it generated. But the alarm did not come from nowhere. Search Console’s links report has sat stale for roughly a month, and Google Business Profile Insights shipped no September performance data at all, two separate reporting failures that predate this indexing glitch by weeks. Site owners who already cannot trust one dashboard number are primed to treat the next anomaly as evidence of a deeper problem rather than an isolated bug, even when Google is right that this one specific incident was small.
That gap between a real, contained bug and a credibility problem across Google’s reporting surfaces is the part worth tracking. Google’s own diagnostics, from the links report to Business Profile Insights to now indexing status, are the tools SEOs use to verify that everything else is working. When multiple reporting layers degrade in the same stretch, even a resolved overnight blip reads as one more data point rather than a closed incident.
Search Console remains the primary tool for verifying indexing status, and Mueller’s advice, to spot-check a homepage directly in search results when a report looks wrong, is sound short-term guidance. It does not, however, address the older stale-links and missing-Insights-data problems that were already eroding confidence in the reporting layer before this bug appeared. According to Search Engine Roundtable, Google has not said whether the links report or Business Profile Insights gaps are connected to the same underlying reporting infrastructure as the indexing status bug.
Teams should not chase phantom deindexing from this specific incident since Google has confirmed it was a reporting-only glitch that self-resolved. The more durable action is to keep a running log of which Search Console and Business Profile reports have been unreliable over the past month, so a genuine indexing problem is not lost in the noise the next time a dashboard misfires.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the confirmed reporting glitch and John Mueller’s response on September 9, 2026.
