Google's mass PDF deindexing: how to find affected files via Search Console APIs

gaganghotra_ · x · 2026-09-17

SEO expert Glenn Gabe documents Google's late-August mass deindexing of PDFs, which moved many ranked files to "Crawled, not indexed" and tanked traffic, with some sites later seeing reindexing and recovery. His tutorial shows how to combine the Search Analytics API and URL Inspection API to find affected PDFs at scale — a process extensible to any file type. He reiterates that repurposing PDF content as HTML remains the best long-term fix.

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