Correctness · document 04

Indexed vs Live

In the workspace: /indexed-live-diff/

Availability

Included on every plan, including the free trial

This document is open to every reader on every plan. Availability tells you what a plan includes; it does not decide what you may read.

What it is for

What Google holds on file for a page and what your server sends today are two different documents, and the gap between them is where a quiet regression lives. A title rewritten three weeks ago, a canonical pointing somewhere it should not, a description that changed in a template: none of these announce themselves. This instrument puts the indexed evidence and the live page beside each other so the difference is visible rather than inferred.

How to use it

Connect Search Console for the project first. The indexed half of this comparison comes from Google, so without that connection there is nothing to compare against.
Select the project, then enter the address of one page.
Run the comparison. Both halves are fetched for that one address.
Read the rows that differ. Rows that agree are shown too, because knowing what did not change is part of the evidence.

Reading the result

Each row is one signal, with the indexed value on one side and the live value on the other. A difference is a fact, not automatically a defect: you may have improved the page since it was crawled. The verdict tells you which signals disagree; deciding which disagreement matters is your judgement, and this instrument is deliberately not making it for you.

What it cannot tell you

The indexed side is what Google last recorded, which may be weeks old and is not a promise about what is currently ranking. It cannot tell you why Google recorded what it did, and it covers one address per run rather than the whole site.

What it keeps

Nothing. No report payload and no comparison history is written to the database; the result exists until you log out.