How many URLs per day should you submit for indexing?
Ask the question relatively, not absolutely. Your ceiling is a function of the crawl attention your domain already earns — which Search Console reports — not a universal figure someone posted in 2019.
This is the single most asked question in every indexing community, and it has no honest absolute answer. Google does not publish a submission threshold, has never confirmed one exists, and the numbers circulating on forums are folklore repeated until they sounded official.
What you can do is derive a figure that is defensible for your domain.
Step 1: read your actual crawl baseline
Open Search Console → Settings → Crawl stats. The average daily crawl requests figure tells you roughly how much attention Googlebot currently spends on the domain. A site receiving 90 crawl requests a day is being handled very differently from one receiving 40,000.
This is the number your submission plan should be scaled against. Google's own crawl budget documentation is explicit that crawl capacity is finite and that it matters mostly for large or frequently updated sites — which is exactly the case where a submission dump does the most damage.
Step 2: pick a ratio, not a number
A workable starting point from our own campaigns is to keep a day's submissions at or below the domain's average daily crawl requests, and well below it while the domain is young. If the site averages 200 crawl requests a day, 200 submitted URLs is an aggressive day and 60 is a conservative one.
| Situation | Starting daily volume | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Domain under 3 months, no ranking history | 20–50 | There is no crawl baseline to lean on yet |
| Established site, links to third-party donors | Up to the donor mix, not your own crawl rate | The bottleneck is the donor's crawl budget, not yours |
| Established site, own pages | At or under average daily crawl requests | You are competing with your own site for the same budget |
| Large catalogue, 10k+ URLs | Segment first, then schedule | See indexing large catalogues |
Step 3: remember whose budget you are spending
When you index backlinks, the crawl budget being consumed belongs to the donor site, not yours. Submitting four hundred URLs across four hundred different domains is a completely different load profile from four hundred URLs on one directory — the second one asks a single site to absorb four hundred crawls it did not plan for. Split those two lists and schedule them separately.
Step 4: react to a stall, do not push through it
If day four's batch indexes at half the rate of day one's, that is a signal, and increasing volume is the wrong response. Pause, check whether the affected URLs share a donor, a template or a content pattern, and fix that before resuming. The most common finding is not a rate problem at all — it is that a subset of donor pages were never worth crawling.
Why the folklore numbers are wrong
Figures like "never more than 100 a day" are absolute answers to a relative question. They were derived from someone's specific domain, at a specific age, in a specific niche, several algorithm generations ago. Applied to a large e-commerce site they are absurdly conservative; applied to a two-week-old domain they are reckless.
Questions
Is there an official Google limit on daily URL submissions?
No. Google publishes quotas for the Indexing API, which covers job postings and livestream pages only, but there is no published daily limit for ordinary crawl requests or sitemap submissions.
Should I count backlinks and my own pages in the same daily total?
No. Indexing your own pages spends your domain's crawl budget; indexing backlinks spends the donor's. Track and schedule them as two separate lists.
Set the daily volume once, then leave it
Upload the list, pick the window, and the task paces itself. Unindexed URLs are refunded to your balance at the end.
Set up a paced task