There's no API' doesn't mean 'can't be automated
For weeks I told myself Google Search Console's "Request indexing" had to be done by hand. The reasoning felt solid: there's no API for it, therefore a human must click it.
That conclusion was wrong, and it cost me days.
The distinction I was missing
No API means no programmatic interface. It doesn't mean no browser interface. If a human can do it by clicking, a script driving a browser can usually do it too.
What it actually took
One afternoon:
- Open the URL inspection tool
- Find the input field (locate it by its aria-label, which is more stable than any selector)
- Set the value using the native property setter, then dispatch an input event — Angular ignores direct assignments
- Dispatch Enter
- Wait for the check to finish
- Click "Request indexing"
Roughly 26 seconds per URL. Batched two at a time to avoid timeouts. Ten priority pages pushed the first day, and a queue handles the rest daily.
The part that stung
I'd been sitting on 72 undiscovered pages while telling myself the bottleneck was unavoidable. The bottleneck was my own assumption.
I'd even said it out loud more than once: "this one has to be manual." Nobody challenged it, including me.
The general lesson
When you catch yourself saying "X has to be manual," check which claim you're actually making — "no API" or "no interface." They're different, and only the first one is usually true.
Site builds and diagnostics if you want help automating this kind of thing: /