Search Console

"Discovered – currently not indexed" on a React app: the real reason

Google sees your URL but won't crawl it. For React, Vite and Lovable sites the cause is almost always the same one thing — and the fix takes a single afternoon.

9 May 2026·7 min read

What 'Discovered – currently not indexed' actually means

In Google Search Console, "Discovered – currently not indexed" means Google has found your URL (usually via a sitemap or backlink) but hasn't bothered to crawl it yet — or it crawled and decided not to index it. Google publicly frames this as a crawl-budget decision: "We saw it, we'll get to it later."

On React, Vite and Lovable sites it's almost never about crawl budget. It's about content quality at the URL Google sees. And the URL Google sees is empty.

Why it hits React apps in particular

Standard React apps render on the client. The HTML response Google gets is essentially this:

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head><title>Vite + React</title></head>
  <body>
    <div id="root"></div>
    <script type="module" src="/src/main.tsx"></script>
  </body>
</html>

Google can render JavaScript, but it does so on a delay — and the first-pass crawler that decides whether to index you only sees the HTML above. Empty shell + generic title = "we'll skip it." Hence: discovered, not indexed.

The fix in three steps

1. Pre-render or SSR the route. Lovable's TanStack Start template ships with SSR. If you exported to a different host, make sure the deploy target is rendering HTML, not just serving the SPA bundle.

2. Give the page a unique title and meta description. Not "Vite + React". Not your project name. The actual page topic, in 50–60 characters.

3. Add real content above the fold. A headline, an H1, two short paragraphs. Google's quality classifier weights what's in the HTML response, not what your client-side router will eventually render.

How to confirm it's working

After deploying, run the URL through Search Console's URL Inspection tool and click "View Crawled Page → HTML". If you can see your headline and copy in the HTML tab, you're fixed. Then click "Request Indexing".

Most sites move from "Discovered – currently not indexed" to indexed within 5–10 days of a successful re-crawl. If it's still stuck after two weeks, you need to ship more content on the URL — at that point Google has decided the page isn't worth indexing.

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