The problem
Google discovers pages by crawling, but on new sites, large sites, and pages fed by backlinks, discovery can take weeks, or never happen. A page that isn't in the index can't rank for anything. Indexing services exist to speed that discovery up, but the market has two persistent problems: you're often charged for URLs that were already indexed, and "indexed" is usually reported by the same company you paid, marking its own homework.
Step 1. Pre-check: never pay for what's already done
Before any submission, every URL goes through a pre-check:
- Is it already in Google's index? If so, it's marked
already_indexedand you're not charged. - Does it return a non-200 status, carry a
noindexmeta tag or header, sit behind arobots.txtdisallow, canonical to a different URL, or bounce through a redirect chain? Then it can't be indexed as submitted, so it's markednon_indexable. You're told exactly why, and you're not charged.
In practice a meaningful share of any bulk URL list falls into these two buckets. Every other service happily charges for them.
Step 2. Routing: submissions with a memory
We don't run our own indexing infrastructure, and we say so. We submit through established third-party indexing providers, and we route each URL to the provider our accumulated outcome data says is most likely to land that kind of URL. Because we see results across providers, we learn things no single provider can: who lands what, how fast, and how reliably. Failed URLs are retried through a different provider before we ever mark them failed.
The provider used is shown on every URL in your project view. If that transparency ever makes us look bad, so be it. It's the same rule as the live log on the homepage.
Step 3. Verification: measured, not claimed
The state you see is measured by us, never copied from a provider's dashboard. Two tiers:
- With Search Console connected (for sites you own): we use Google's URL Inspection API, the authoritative answer on whether a URL is indexed, when it was last crawled, and how it was discovered. This is the ground truth tier, and it's what powers the crawl timeline.
- Without Search Console (third-party URLs, backlinks): we fall back to checking Google's live search results. That check is inherently probabilistic, and we label it that way in the UI instead of dressing it up as certainty.
Step 4. Settlement: one credit, one indexed URL
Credits are only consumed by URLs that land in Google:
| Already indexed | Not charged. Reported to you as a saving. |
|---|---|
| Non-indexable | Not charged. Reported with the exact reason. |
| Indexed & verified | One credit consumed. |
| Not indexed after retries | Marked failed, credits automatically refunded to your balance. |
What this isn't
Indexing is admission, not placement: it gets a page into Google, and ranking remains the job of your content and your site. We don't do click-through manipulation or traffic generation, and we don't repeat providers' claims about their internal methods; we state only what we control and measure ourselves.
The proof
rank.fast itself is a cold domain: registered a year ago but never used, with not a single link pointing in.
Every page on this site goes through the pipeline described above, and the real
timings (publication, submission, first Googlebot hit, indexing) are published on
the live index log, ugly days included. The raw data behind the
timeline is public at /data/crawl-log.json.