Google removed the Indexing API approval form. Is your 200-a-day quota doing anything?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The 16 October change removed a form, not a limit. The quota and the job and livestream scope are unchanged.
2. A 200 from publish followed by a 404 from getMetadata means Google holds no record of a successful notification.
3. Deletes and updates share the same 200 units. High-churn boards must ration both.
4. Sitemaps and good internal links still carry most discovery. Treat the API as a speed-up, not the plan.

On 16 October 2026 Google edited three Indexing API pages. Its changelog gives the reason as "to document the current quota limits for the Indexing API and remove an outdated form." The form was the one job boards used to ask for approval and more quota.

Some coverage read this as the API opening up. The documentation does not say that, and no one has yet published a test showing it. This piece separates what changed from what did not, gives a three-call check you can run on your own project, and shows how to budget the quota you have.

What exactly changed on 16 October?

Search Engine Journal compared the pages before and after. Google removed:

• The "Request quota and approval" section on the quota page, which linked to the form.
• The "Request approval and quota" step from the quickstart, which now has three steps instead of four.
• Notes on the usage page that described the default quota as being for testing.

The quickstart also dropped a paragraph recommending the API over sitemaps for short-lived pages.

The changelog says Google updated the quota page "to reflect the current quota limits and process." It does not say whether approval is still required. That changelog line is the only explanation Google has published.

What stayed the same?

Almost everything that affects your crawl budget.

Two other Google pages still point people at the API. The job posting structured data guide, last updated 8 September 2026, says "For job posting URLs, we recommend using the Indexing API instead of sitemaps." The video guide, updated 24 September, tells livestream publishers to use it so Google crawls the stream at the right time. Google now recommends a tool in two places while documenting no way to get production access to it.

Was anyone being approved anyway?

The evidence says not for a long time. It is anecdotal, but consistent.

Alexander Chukovski, who works with job boards, wrote in July 2026 that he had seen more than 50 applications since October 2025 and no approvals. Nick LeRoy, writing in Search Engine Land in July, said his own requests for two job sites had sat for about six months with no approval, rejection or question. He noted that years earlier, running a large board, approval took two to three weeks. Between them they cited more than 100 job boards as data points and knew of no approvals in 2026.

Search Engine Journal reported in September that it asked Google about the silence and got no response. The most direct Google statement is John Mueller's from May 2026: "the indexing API is inundated by bloggers trying to act like legitimate sites." He added that Google was probably more cautious as a result.

Does the change mean every project now has a working quota?

This is where the sources disagree.

Chukovski, writing on 16 October, considered that the 200 daily requests might now be a working quota for everyone. He also noted that his Cloud Console still showed an apply-for-higher-quota link, out of sync with the docs, and said he would run a test and report back. LeRoy had earlier reported the opposite pattern from his own unapproved project: publish returned 200, but getMetadata returned 404, which he read as the request never reaching Google's indexing queue.

Google's own reference sides with LeRoy's reading of that pattern. The getMetadata page says the method "can only be used to query URLs that were previously seen in successful Indexing API notifications." So a 404 there means Google has no record of a successful notification for that URL, whatever the publish call returned.

What we can say on 25 October: the documentation changed, and no published controlled test shows that the behaviour did. You do not need to wait for one. You can check your own project.

How do you test whether your notifications are recorded?

Run this on five to ten live job or livestream URLs that are not yet indexed.

1. Publish. Send a URL_UPDATED notification for each URL. Note the HTTP status. A 403 means ownership verification failed. A 429 means you are out of quota for the day. A 200 means only that Google may try to recrawl soon.
2. Read it back. Within the same day, call getMetadata for each URL. If it returns the notification with its notify time, Google recorded it. If it returns 404, it did not.
3. Check what Google did. Over the next few days, use the Search Console URL Inspection API on the same URLs. It allows 2,000 inspections a day and 600 a minute per site, but note it reports indexed status only. It cannot test a live URL or request indexing.
4. Check your logs. Look for a Googlebot request to each URL after the notify time. A recorded notification with no crawl is a weaker result than a recorded notification with a crawl inside a day.
5. Compare with a control. Track five similar URLs you did not notify. If both groups get crawled and indexed on the same schedule, the API is not buying you anything.

Read the results like this:

How should a job board budget 200 publish units?

Quota is counted per URL, and a batch of up to 100 calls still uses one unit per URL. Updates and deletes share the same pool. Before a URL_DELETED, the page must return 404 or 410 or carry a noindex tag.

Take a board that posts 500 new jobs a day and expires 450. That is 950 notifications wanted against 200 available. A workable split:

1. Spend most units on new, high-value postings. For example, 150 units on the newest jobs in the categories that drive applications.
2. Reserve the rest for removals that matter most. For example, 50 units for expired jobs that still get the most search impressions, so stale listings drop out of Google Jobs first.
3. Let sitemaps carry the long tail. Keep an accurate sitemap with lastmod dates for every live job. Google's job posting guide still recommends a sitemap for the whole site.
4. Verify a sample. Use part of the 2,000 daily URL Inspection calls to check a fixed sample of notified and un-notified URLs each week.

If your test shows getMetadata returning 404, the split does not matter. The 200 units are not reaching Google, and the sitemap and internal links are your whole discovery system.

What do most guides on this get wrong?

Several pages ranking for the API still tell readers to fill in the approval form, which no longer appears in the docs. Some describe "new quotas" when the limits did not change. Older guides still quote 100 links a day; the documented limit is 200 a day, with batches of up to 100 calls. Some plugin pages say the API works on any type of website, which Google's documentation directly contradicts.

The bigger gap is that almost none give a way to check whether your project is actually being heard. The getMetadata rule above is in Google's own reference and is the cheapest test available.

What should you do now?

It depends on what you publish.

For a site that cannot use the API, the alternatives are the same as before. Google says crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks, and asking for the same URL again does not speed it up. A clean sitemap, strong internal links from pages Google already crawls often, and fast removal of expired pages matter more than any one notification.

If you run user-generated listings, Google's newer intake route for fresh content is covered in the UGC Fresh Data Program. Whichever route you use, notify and list the exact canonical URL. Encoded or reordered variants can count as different URLs, as covered in URL encoding variants.

We publish a new technical SEO breakdown most weeks. Join the waitlist to hear when the Ethos Engine audit opens.

Questions

Did Google change the Indexing API quota in October 2026?

No. The quota page still lists 200 publish requests a day, 180 getMetadata requests a minute and 380 requests a minute across all endpoints, per project. What changed on 16 October was the removal of the approval form and the steps that told developers to request approval and more quota.

Can I still request more Indexing API quota?

Google's documentation no longer describes any way to do so. Operators reported a higher-quota link in the Cloud Console on 16 October, and later reports said it had gone. Practitioners had already seen dozens of job board applications go unanswered since late 2025.

Does a 200 response mean my job page will be indexed?

No. Google says a 200 means it may try to recrawl the URL soon. Crawling, indexing and ranking are separate steps, and getMetadata only confirms that a notification was recorded.

Can I use the Indexing API for blog posts or product pages?

Google's docs say it can only be used for pages with JobPosting or BroadcastEvent embedded in a VideoObject. Google staff have repeatedly said other uses are unsupported, and John Mueller said in May 2026 that the API is inundated by bloggers.

Sources

1. Google Search Central, Latest Google Search documentation updates developers.google.com
2. Google for Developers, Indexing API quota and pricing developers.google.com
3. Google for Developers, Indexing API quickstart developers.google.com
4. Google for Developers, Using the Indexing API developers.google.com
5. Google for Developers, Method urlNotifications.getMetadata developers.google.com
6. Google for Developers, Indexing API errors developers.google.com
7. Google Search Central, Job posting structured data developers.google.com
8. Google Search Central, Video structured data developers.google.com
9. Google for Developers, Search Console API usage limits developers.google.com
10. Google Search Central, Ask Google to recrawl your URLs developers.google.com
11. Search Engine Journal, Google's Indexing API docs no longer explain how to get approval searchenginejournal.com
12. Search Engine Journal, Job boards say Google Indexing API requests get no response searchenginejournal.com
13. Search Engine Land, Google's job Indexing API isn't the shortcut you think it is searchengineland.com
14. Alexander Chukovski, Google removes the Indexing API quota form. What now alexanderchukovski.com
15. Search Engine Roundtable, Google says its Indexing API is inundated by bloggers seroundtable.com

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