Location page indexing study: 1,054 programmatic pages across 9 sites

What are the key findings?

• Of 1,054 programmatic pages that Scaleo SEO published for 9 client sites in India, 997 (94.6%) were reported by Google Search Console as "Submitted and indexed" in October 2026.
• Of the 8 sites with 20 or more published pages, 7 had between 94% and 98% of their pages indexed; the eighth had only 46% indexed.
• On the lowest-indexing site, 16 of the 17 pages Google reported as "URL is unknown to Google" were absent from the sitemap Google had read.
• Blog posts earned 202.6 clicks per 100 pages over 90 days, compared with 60.3 for service × location pages, about 3.4 times as many.
• Only 7.9% of 927 service × location pages had zero impressions in 90 days, against 14.8% of 115 blog posts.
• 62% of all impressions (120,804 of 194,548) went to pages with an average position of 4 to 10, where click-through rate was 0.46%.
• Cost and price pages had the highest click-through rate of any page type, at 1.01%, from a small sample of 11 pages.

How was the study done?

The sample is every page Scaleo SEO generated and published for 9 client websites in India: dental clinics, hospitals, a fertility centre and a digital agency. 1,074 pages were live; 1,054 of them were checked with the Google Search Console URL Inspection tool, and 1,053 had search performance data. Search data (impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position) covers the 90 days to 16 October 2026.

• What was measured: the URL Inspection coverage state of each page, plus its impressions, clicks, CTR and average position from Search Console.
• Page type: each page was classified by its URL and template as a service × location page (one treatment or service for one city or locality), a cost or price page, or a blog post.
• Position bands: pages were grouped by their average position over the window. Pages with no impressions have no position, so the bands cover 962 pages.
• Anonymised: results are aggregates. No client, domain or URL is named, and sites are labelled A to H.

What are the limits of this data?

• The cost page sample is small (n=11), so its CTR and impression figures are indicative only.
• The sites are mostly Indian healthcare businesses. Results may differ for other industries and countries.
• Coverage is a snapshot of each page's state at the time of inspection in October 2026, not a history.
• This is observational data from one platform's output. It shows what happened, not what caused it.

How many programmatic pages did Google index?

94.6% of inspected pages were indexed. The largest group of the rest, "URL is unknown to Google", means Google had not discovered the page at all, which is a discovery problem rather than a quality judgement.

Which page types got the most impressions and clicks?

Service × location pages made up most of the sample and almost all of them were seen in search. Blog posts had a higher median and a much higher mean, which means a minority of posts drew far more impressions than the rest, and they earned about 3.4 times the clicks per page.

Where do programmatic pages rank, and what CTR do they get?

Most impressions sat at average positions 4 to 10: page one, but below the top three. Click-through there was 0.46%. Only 20 pages averaged a top-three position, and they had just 36 impressions between them, so their 0% CTR says little.

How much did indexing vary from site to site?

For the 8 sites with 20 or more pages, indexing was consistent except for one outlier. The ninth site had fewer than 20 pages and is left out of this table.

What did the 46% site have in common?

The low-indexing site was not a content quality problem. 17 of its pages were "URL is unknown to Google", meaning Google had never found them, and 16 of those 17 were missing from the sitemap Google had read. The pages were listed in a second sitemap that robots.txt did not reference, and nothing on the main site linked to them.

The fix was to add the second sitemap to robots.txt and to add internal links to the pages from the main site. The practical lesson: if Google cannot discover a page, it cannot index it, however good the page is.

What should agencies take from this?

1. Discovery beats volume. Make sure every page is in a sitemap Google actually reads, referenced in robots.txt or submitted in Search Console, and linked from the main site. Sitemaps and internal links mattered more than how many pages a site had.
2. Do not skip the blog. Blog posts earned about 3.4 times the clicks per page of location pages. Location pages and supporting articles work together.
3. Work on titles and meta descriptions. With 62% of impressions at positions 4 to 10 and CTR under 1%, better titles and descriptions are the cheapest way to turn existing impressions into clicks.
4. Check URL Inspection, not just page counts. A rising share of "URL is unknown to Google" or "Discovered, currently not indexed" is the signal to fix discovery before publishing more. See how many location pages to build, and our guide to fixing location pages that are not indexed for each status.

How should you cite this study?

Scaleo SEO, Location Page Indexing Study, October 2026, https://scaleo.in/research/location-page-indexing-study