IndexCheckr Feb 2025 16M-page snapshot — context, methodology disclosure, and how to read the two numbers (timing distribution vs full-snapshot) without conflating them

Context: IndexCheckr published two distinct numbers from the same Feb 28, 2025 "Insights from 16 Million Pages" dataset that are commonly conflated:

1. Timing distribution on the indexed subset (see Benchmark #3 (Single-source): IndexCheckr Feb 2025 — 14% indexed in 7 days, ~65% in 30 days, 85% by 90 days, 93.2% by 6 months, average 27.4 days (16M pages)). Sample: pages that eventually got indexed. Answers "when do indexed pages get indexed."

2. Full-snapshot distribution (see Benchmark #6 (Single-source): IndexCheckr Feb 2025 full-snapshot — 37.08% indexed / 61.94% page-not-indexed / 0.98% domain-not-indexed (16M pages)) — 37.08% indexed / 61.94% page-not-indexed / 0.98% domain-not-indexed across the entire 16M sample at the moment of measurement.

They answer different questions. The timing-distribution is about speed (and is survivorship-biased — pages that never got indexed are excluded from the denominator). The full-snapshot is about coverage (and over-counts unindexed because the universe includes low-value/junk URLs).

Source: IndexCheckr, "Insights from 16 Million Pages," Feb 28, 2025.

Confidence: Single-source for each figure individually.

Caveat: Do not present "61.94% of pages are never indexed" as a per-page expectation for a typical SMB site — that figure is an open-web average across a junk-heavy universe. Use Onely's 16%-of-valuable-indexable-pages figure (Onely (Tomek Rudzki) — "on average, 83% of pages are indexed within the first week of publication; some pages have to wait up to eight weeks"; ~16% of valuable, indexable pages on popular sites NEVER get indexed — flag survivorship) for the intentional-page failure-tail anchor instead.