New Search Console Features: Video Indexing Report and Recommendations

Video creation and consumption on the web continues to grow, and Google Search indexes videos from millions of different sites, so people can easily discover and watch this content. To help you understand the performance of your videos on Google, and identify possible areas of improvement, Search Console is launching a new report called Video indexing. We will roll out this change gradually over the next few months, so you might not see any changes for now.

The Video Indexing Report

If Google detects videos on your site, the Video indexing report will appear on the left navigation bar in the coverage section. The report shows the status of video indexing on your site. It helps you answer the following questions:

  • In how many pages has Google identified a video?
  • Which videos were indexed successfully?
  • What are the issues preventing videos from being indexed?

In addition, if you fix an existing issue, you can use the report to validate the fix and track how your fixed video pages are updated in the Google index. Please note that this report is different from the Video Rich results report. The report discussed in today’s post is about video indexing, regardless of any video structured data, and therefore it does not show the validity of Video structured data items. The Video Rich results report is unchanged and continues to show which Video structured data items are valid or invalid on your site.

Inspecting a Specific Video Page

In addition to the new report, we also enhanced the URL Inspection tool to allow you to check the video indexing status of a specific page. When inspecting a page, if Google detected a video in it, you will see the following in the results:

  • Details such as the video URL and the thumbnail URL.
  • The page status showing whether the video was indexed or not.
  • List of issues preventing the video from being indexed.

Note that this does not apply to live inspection, which does not show video indexing status and will only indicate if a video was detected on the page being inspected.

Introducing Search Console Recommendations

We are excited to announce Search Console recommendations, a new feature that provides websites with optimization opportunities and suggests actions they can take to improve their presence on Google Search. Recommendations are based on a variety of Google Search systems data, like indexing, crawling and serving. They can help you prioritize your search optimization efforts, such as using structured data to help Google understand your content, adding sitemaps, and checking out trending queries and pages.

Availability and Experimental Rollout

The recommendations will appear in the Search Console overview page. This is still an experimental feature, and not all sites will have recommendations at this stage; we'll be rolling out this feature slowly over the coming months. Note that even after complete rollout, we'll only provide recommendations when we have a recommendation available for your website. The recommendations are computed on a regular basis and may expire or change details over time.

Summary of Features

  • Video Indexing Report: Shows indexing status and issues for videos across the whole site.
  • URL Inspection Tool: Provides specific indexing details for individual video pages.
  • Search Console Recommendations: Offers direct suggestions to improve site presence and prioritization.