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When you see this

Discovered - currently not indexed appears in two places:
  • Search Console, Pages report, under “Why pages aren’t indexed” - for properties you own.
  • The URL Inspection tool / API, field coverageState - the response also shows an empty lastCrawlTime.
The exact meaning: Google knows the URL but has never fetched it. For a page hosting a link to your site (a donor page), the link has not been read at all.
For third-party donor pages you cannot open Search Console. The equivalent signal is: the URL is absent from a live index check AND the site owner’s report shows this status, or the page is absent from the index for 14+ days after placement.

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Why it happens

  • Deferred crawl: Google postponed the fetch to avoid overloading the host - the official explanation in the Search Console help. Evidence: rising average response time in the host’s Crawl Stats.
  • Weak internal linking: the page is 3+ clicks deep or linked only from pagination. Evidence: zero internal links from crawled hub pages.
  • Low host crawl rate: the whole site gets few Googlebot visits. Evidence: sparse Googlebot hits in server logs.
  • Queue displacement: large sites generate URLs faster than their crawl budget covers. Evidence: the status concentrates on one section or URL pattern.

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Fix

1

Confirm the state

For your own property, inspect the URL: coverageState reads Discovered - currently not indexed, lastCrawlTime is empty. For a batch, run the bulk indexation check for backlinks and keep the URLs reported as not indexed.
2

Remove delivery blockers

Request the page with a Googlebot user agent. Expected: HTTP/2 200 in under ~2 seconds, no X-Robots-Tag: noindex, no Disallow covering the path. Any failure here explains the deferral and must be fixed first (or the donor replaced).
3

Create crawl paths

If you control the host: link the page from a frequently crawled hub and refresh lastmod in the sitemap. Expected outcome within 1-2 weeks: lastCrawlTime gains a date.
4

Submit for crawling

For third-party donors, submit the URL list to an indexing service. Expected outcome: a day-7 report splitting the list into indexed / not indexed / errored.

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Verify

Fixed looks like one of two states: the page appears in a live index check with its title, or the inspection verdict changes to Submitted and indexed. A move to Crawled - currently not indexed is partial progress - the fetch happened; the remaining problem is selection, not delivery.
Submitting URLs that still carry noindex, return 404, or sit behind Disallow wastes the submission - these states are filtered by pre-check, not fixed by it.