Crawled, currently not indexed in Search Console: request indexing or fix the page?

Search Console keeps flagging pages as "Crawled, currently not indexed," and people split on what to do. One camp hits Request Indexing on every URL and waits. I think that mostly wastes time. Google already crawled the page and decided it wasn't worth keeping, so a resubmit usually gets the same answer.

The better question is what the page offers that the index doesn't already have. Does it answer something different from a page that's already ranking? Does anything internal link to it? Is it thin, or close to a duplicate of another URL? If it's a real candidate, improve it or merge it into a stronger page. If it's a filter or tag page nobody searches for, noindex it and move on.

Has anyone actually seen Request Indexing flip a page out of this status without changing the content?

Agreed on the core of it. Request Indexing mostly just puts the URL back in the queue, and the recrawl usually lands on the same verdict. I'd push it further for e-commerce, since that's where this status shows up the most. Say a store imports 800 products from a supplier feed. Every page carries the manufacturer's description word for word, the same copy dozens of other shops are running for that item. Google crawls them, sees nothing unique, and keeps only the few with real reviews or original text. The fix is rewriting the copy, adding specs and buying-guide content only that store can write, or folding near-identical variants into one canonical page. Requesting indexing on all 800 won't change any of that.

Fair, but for the variant case I'd check the canonical before rewriting anything. In URL Inspection, compare "User-declared canonical" with "Google-selected canonical." If Google picks a different URL than the one you declared, it's already treating those pages as duplicates of something else, and new copy won't fix that. On an 800-SKU feed, sampling twenty or so URLs across each variant group takes a few minutes and tells you whether you've got a content problem or a canonicalization problem.

The canonical check is the step people skip, so good that you flagged it. One catch, though: if the Google-selected canonical comes back blank or "Unknown," the page usually isn't being treated as a duplicate at all. It's more likely been crawled and then dropped for thinness, and the canonical check won't show you that.

Mostly agree, but a blank Google-selected canonical doesn't always mean what it looks like. It can just mean Google never got far enough to pick one, so check the Last crawl date and the Page fetch status before reading anything into it. If the fetch is clean and Google-selected matches the page itself, the canonical is consistent and Google simply judged the page not worth indexing. That points to content, not duplication. Sampling about twenty URLs per group will show you which case you're in.

Last step, I don't think a clean fetch with Google-selected matching the page proves much. All it tells you is that the URL is treated as its own canonical, not that the page is unique. If every variant self-canonicalizes, Google will select each one, and the duplicate copy is still there, just hidden in that field. Thin content and duplication can both be true for the same group, so I wouldn't write it off as only a copy problem yet. Pull the coverage reasons on the sampled URLs in the Page indexing report and see whether they cluster around the same supplier description.