Should I click Request indexing for a page that is crawled but not indexed?

Not as a first step. Google's help says there is no need to resubmit these URLs, and Google's documentation says requesting a recrawl of the same URL several times does not get it crawled any faster. Change the page first, then request indexing once if it matters.

Does Crawled – currently not indexed mean my site has a penalty?

No. It is an ordinary indexing status, not a manual action. Google reports manual actions in the Manual actions report and in Search Console's messages, so you can rule one out in a minute.

How long does it take for a crawled page to be indexed?

Google gives no timetable for this status. Its help says the page may or may not be indexed in the future, and its documentation says crawling in general can take from a few days to a few weeks. If an improved page is still excluded after several weeks, look again at its content and its internal links.

Is it a problem if most of my site is crawled but not indexed?

A handful of URLs in this status is normal on any site. A large share of your important pages is a different signal, usually about duplication or thin pages across the site rather than one URL, and it calls for a review of which pages deserve to exist.

Crawled – currently not indexed: what it means and how to fix it

Google crawled the page but chose not to index it, for now. What 'Crawled – currently not indexed' means, the usual causes, what to fix and when to wait.

“Crawled – currently not indexed” in Google Search Console means Googlebot fetched the page and Google then decided not to add it to its index, at least for now. Google’s help says such a page “may or may not be indexed in the future” and that there is no need to resubmit it. The fetch worked, so this is rarely a technical fault. The usual explanation is a judgement about the page: too thin, too similar to another page, or not important enough to keep. The fix is to change the page or its place in your site, not to keep pressing Request indexing.

What does “Crawled – currently not indexed” mean?

It is one of the reasons listed under “Why pages aren’t indexed” in the Page indexing report (Indexing → Pages). Crawling and indexing are separate steps. Google’s guide to how Search works puts it plainly: “Indexing isn’t guaranteed; not every page that Google processes will be indexed.”

This status sits in that gap. The fetch succeeded, so the cause is not robots.txt, a server error or a 404; those have rows of their own in Google’s Page indexing report help. Google has a last crawl date for the page, and you can see it in URL Inspection. What went against the page was the decision after the crawl, and the report does not say why.

The neighbouring status, “Discovered – currently not indexed”, is the earlier stage: Google knows the URL but has not fetched it yet, and the last crawl date is blank. That one is about crawling capacity and priority, and it has its own write-up.

Is it a problem?

That depends entirely on which URLs are listed. Google’s help says you should not expect every URL on a site to be indexed, and plenty of pages land here without anyone needing to care:

tag, category and date archives with one or two posts on them
paginated list pages and internal search results
filtered or sorted views of the same products
thin profile, author or attachment pages
old posts that were never more than a paragraph

It is a problem when the list includes pages that are supposed to earn traffic: product and service pages, articles you put real work into, landing pages for campaigns. It is also worth a look when the count jumps suddenly across the whole site.

A quick way to separate the two: in the Page indexing report, switch the filter from “All known pages” to “All submitted pages”. That narrows the list to URLs in your sitemaps, which are, in theory, the ones you want indexed.

What causes it?

Google’s guide lists three common indexing issues: low-quality content on the page, robots meta rules that disallow indexing, and site design that makes indexing difficult. A noindex would show up as its own reason, so for this status the first and third are the ones to check. In practice they take a few recognisable forms.

Thin pages. Very little text, mostly boilerplate, or a template waiting for content that never arrived.

Near-duplicates. Location pages that differ by nothing but the town name, product variants with identical descriptions, text that also lives on another site, or two of your own pages answering the same question. Google groups similar pages and picks one to represent the group; the others are left out, sometimes under this reason and sometimes under one of the duplicate reasons. If two of your pages compete for the same queries, the cannibalisation check is the same problem seen from the performance side.

Weak signals of importance. Pages linked from nowhere except the sitemap, or buried several clicks deep in pagination, tell Google little about why they matter.

Rendering. If the main content depends on JavaScript that fails or times out, Google may have seen a near-empty page. The live test in URL Inspection includes a screenshot of the page as Google renders it.

Newness. For a page published last week, the decision may not be final.

How to fix it

List the affected URLs and sort them into two piles: should be indexed, and does not need to be.
For the second pile, decide deliberately. Leave them, add noindex, or merge them into a stronger page with a 301 redirect. If a template keeps generating low-value URLs (a tag page per tag, however rarely used), fix the template.
For the first pile, open one URL in URL Inspection and run Test live URL. Check that the screenshot and the HTML show your real content, and that the page is not blocked or noindexed by accident.
Make the page worth a place in the index. Add what is missing: original information, specifics, the answer a searcher came for. Merge pages that overlap, and make the survivors clearly different from each other.
Link to it from relevant pages that are already indexed, with descriptive anchor text, and keep it in your sitemap.
Request indexing once, after the change. Google’s documentation says requesting a recrawl of the same URL several times will not get it crawled any faster.
Check back in a week or two with URL Inspection, not every morning.

URL Inspection and Request indexing covers steps 3 and 6 in detail, including what the live test cannot tell you.

When to wait instead

Waiting is the right call in three cases. A new page or a new site, because Google says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and indexing decisions follow. A page you have just improved, because Google has to recrawl it before anything can change. And any URL you have decided does not need to rank, which can sit in this status indefinitely.

What does not help is churning: rewriting the page every few days, requesting indexing after each edit, or changing the URL. Make one substantial change, then give it time.

Watching the pages that matter

QueryWatch is an independent app, not affiliated with Google, and it does not show the Page indexing report’s URL lists; those stay in the web interface. It helps at the level of individual pages. The free tier includes 5 URL inspections a day, which show a page’s verdict, coverage state, last crawl date and canonical, so you can check from your phone whether an improved page has made it in. On Pro you can mark key pages as watched and get a push alert when one changes its index verdict or coverage state, whether that is a page finally getting indexed or an important one slipping out. Search Console alerts explains how those alerts work, and the Page indexing report explained covers every other reason you will meet in the same table.