How to know when a page was (first) indexed by Google?

Question

I see that Google has already indexed a page.

However, I cannot find when Google indexed a page.

How to know when a page was (first) indexed by Google?

Answer 1

For a recent indexing

When searching, in the ellipsis (...) menu, after expanding the dropdown, you will usually have a cache option. This gives you a recent index's timestamp:

This is Google's cache of [example.com]. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on [timestamp].

Google Search Console also records when the most recent indexing was done for each page, but this can only be used by the site owner.

You can't find the first

This would be really handy to have, but no such feature exists. Google most certainly has the information somewhere, but you can't access it. (It's not even in Google Search Console.)

Note that:

• Google will tell you when it first indexed any page on the site in the ellipsis (...) menu when searching:

  

• Some search results have a date listed (see Michael's image), which is the date that Google thinks the page was created or last updated (I'm not sure which it's supposed to be). This date is automatically extracted by Google and may not be accurate — I've seen dates listed that predate the internet entirely. (Likewise, wrong years are also often listed in Google Books.) You can visit the page to see where the date is coming from, but this may not be an accurate reflection of anything either since it's easy enough for the author to lie about it.

• When trying to find the date of publication, Archive.org is often your best bet, if the page was popular enough.

Answer 2

I think your question is similar to this other question: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/72659/how-do-i-find-when-an-url-was-first-indexed-by-google

Basically, you just replace the www.example.com below with your URL:

https://www.google.com/search?tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2000&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com&safe=active&gws_rd=ssl

So if I use the Web Apps stack as an example:

https://www.google.com/search?tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2000&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwebapps.stackexchange.com&safe=active&gws_rd=ssl