You click Request Indexing in Google Search Console, wait a minute, and get this back:
Indexing request rejected. During live testing, indexing issues were detected with the URL.
It reads like a verdict on your page. It is not. It means that when you asked for indexing, Search Console first fetched the live page, and that fetch found something that would stop the page being indexed. Google will not queue a request it already knows will fail.
The useful part is that the live test tells you exactly which check failed. Most people never open it.
Where to look
In URL Inspection, click Test live URL, then open the page indexing section of the result. The live test reports three things, and one of them will be the problem:
Crawl allowed? Whether robots.txt lets Googlebot fetch the page.
Page fetch. Whether the fetch succeeded, and if not, why: server error, redirect, not found, access forbidden.
Indexing allowed? Whether the page carries a noindex instruction, in a meta tag or an HTTP header.
View tested page shows the HTML Google actually received and the response headers. That matters, because what Googlebot receives is often not what you see in your browser.
The causes, roughly in order of how often they turn up
1. Your server or firewall refused Googlebot. The most common cause in practice, and the least obvious, because the page loads fine for you. A security plugin, a hosting firewall or a bot protection service can challenge or block requests that look automated, including Googlebot's. The live test then records a failed fetch or a server connection error. Check your firewall or CDN logs for blocked requests from Google's crawlers, and allowlist verified Googlebot rather than switching protection off.
2. A noindex instruction you did not know was there. Left over from a staging site, set by a theme or SEO plugin option, or sent as an X-Robots-Tag header by the server, where you will not see it in the page source. The live test names it under Indexing allowed.
3. robots.txt blocks the path. A Disallow rule that catches more than intended. Test the exact URL, not the homepage.
4. The URL redirects, or returns 404 or a soft 404. Requesting indexing for a URL that redirects elsewhere is rejected because the redirect target is the page that could be indexed, not this one. A page that returns 200 but looks empty to Google can be treated as a soft 404.
5. A temporary server failure. A 5xx during the test, a timeout, or a server that was slow at that moment. If the live test passes when you run it again a few minutes later, this was it.
How to fix it
Open Test live URL and read the three checks. Fix the one that failed. Run Test live URL again until it reports that the URL is available to Google. Only then click Request Indexing again.
Requesting again without fixing anything will keep failing, and there is a daily limit on how many requests you can make.
What the live test does not tell you
A passing live test means Google could index the page. It does not mean Google will.
We have lived this on our own site this month. A post of ours was fetched by Googlebot within a minute of publication, passed everything a live test checks, and sat in "crawled, currently not indexed" for days. Google could see it and chose not to keep it yet. That is a different status with a different cause, and we wrote it up separately in our write-up of crawled, currently not indexed.
The rejection message is the good kind of problem. It is mechanical, the tool tells you which check failed, and it is usually fixed in minutes.
If you want to check a URL's index status without Search Console, for a page on a site you do not own or before you have verified yours, our free index checker at free index checker answers one URL at a time and says why when the answer is no.
What this page is and is not
It explains what the message means and where to find the cause, based on Google's documentation of the URL Inspection tool and the failures reported most often by site owners. We have not hit this specific rejection on rank.fast ourselves, so there is no timed case study here, only the method. Where we have measured something, it is linked.