Understand daily URL Inspection

Learn what Google fetch, canonical, and last-crawl evidence TechDash stores.

Last checked 21 August 2026

URL Inspection gives TechDash stored evidence about the version of a monitored URL known to Google's index. It is not a live crawl, a live indexability test, or a request for Google to recrawl the page.

Google's evidence can describe an earlier crawl. TechDash may fetch a healthy page while URL Inspection reports an old error, canonical, or crawl time. Both can be correct because they describe different moments.

When inspection runs

An enabled monitored URL is eligible for inspection once on each UTC date. TechDash periodically looks for eligible URLs while:

  • The license is usable
  • The computer is online
  • The website is not paused
  • The Search Console connection still has a property and refresh token
  • URL Inspection allowance remains for that UTC date

The homepage is considered first, followed by enabled paths in alphabetical order. Daily eligibility does not guarantee fresh evidence for every URL.

Inspection can stop when the allowance is exhausted, Google applies a quota or rate limit, the connection needs attention, the computer is offline, or work is still queued. A failed request can leave a URL without a new result for that date.

What the request asks Google

TechDash asks Google to inspect the full monitored URL under the saved Search Console property. The URL must belong to that property, and the connection uses read-only Search Console access.

The API returns information about the version in Google's index. It cannot test the live URL. Use Search Console's interactive URL Inspection tools when you need to compare indexed evidence with a live test or request recrawling.

Evidence TechDash stores

For a successful response, TechDash stores:

  • Page fetch state
  • Whether Google reported crawling as mobile or desktop
  • Google-selected canonical
  • User-declared canonical reported by Google
  • Last crawl time
  • The time TechDash made the inspection request

The request time and Google's last crawl time are different. The request time tells you when TechDash collected the evidence. The last crawl time tells you when Google says it crawled the page represented by that evidence.

Checks built from inspection

Successful results can update these Sitewide Checks:

  • Google cannot fetch the page for access-denied or access-forbidden states
  • Google hit server errors for server or redirect error states
  • Google crawling as desktop when crawledAs is desktop
  • Google chose a different canonical when Google's selected canonical differs from the declared canonical
  • Abnormal Google crawl staleness when the latest crawl is much older than that URL's own history

Each check stores a pass or fail result. A pass means the available inspection evidence did not meet that check's failure condition. It does not promise that the URL is indexed, ranking, receiving traffic, or currently fetchable.

The crawl-recency check uses the URL's own history:

  1. It requires at least three unique, valid prior crawl times before the latest reported crawl.
  2. It sorts those times and calculates the gaps between consecutive crawls.
  3. It uses the conventional median gap. For an even number of gaps, it averages the two middle values.
  4. It applies a one-day floor, so the typical gap is never shorter than one day.
  5. It fails only when the age of the latest crawl is strictly greater than three times the typical gap.

For example, if the median historical gap is two days, the result passes through an age of six days and fails only after the age exceeds six days.

Only successful inspections are evaluated. If a URL was not inspected because of allowance, connection, or request errors, it is absent rather than treated as a failed SEO check. This prevents missing evidence from being mistaken for proof of a crawl problem.

What daily means

Use Queue Status and look for Search Console URL inspection when work is waiting. A backlog means inspection has not finished. No waiting jobs does not prove that Google returned a result for every URL.

When reviewing an incident, first compare the two timestamps. Old Google evidence can be benign when a known outage or configuration problem has already been fixed and the live page is healthy. If the finding still reproduces, correct the underlying access, server, mobile, canonical, or discovery problem. Verify current behavior in Search Console, then allow a later daily inspection to store new evidence and update the TechDash result.

Large monitored sets may not finish within the daily allowance. Enable monitoring for the URLs that matter most, keep TechDash running and online, and investigate authorization or property errors separately from quota. Restarting the app does not restore the day's allowance.

Sources

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