The site: operator is an advanced Google Search operator used to restrict results to a specific website or domain.
Though simple, the site: search operator can help you accomplish many SEO tasks without tools, such as quickly identifying indexing issues, optimizing internal linking, or analyzing competitor websites. It’s an essential daily command for website owners, SEO professionals, and content editors.
Basic syntax of the site: search operator
The basic syntax is site:example.com – simply replace example.com with domain you want to search within.
You can also refine the search further to target specific sections or keywords.
Here are some examples of how I use it:
- site:example.com
Returns all pages from example.com that Google has indexed. - site:example.com/folder
Limits results to pages under a specific subdirectory—useful for focusing on blog, product, or help sections. - site:example.com keyword
Shows only pages from example.com that also contain the specified keyword. - site:*.example.com
Searches across all subdomains of example.com—useful for uncovering content spread across support, blog, or shop subdomains.
When doing SEO analysis, combining site: with other Google search operators can help you refine your searches for better precision. These operators help you filter specific types of pages, search by format, analyze keyword placement, check content freshness, or exclude irrelevant results.
Here’s a table of commonly used search operators with site::
| Search operator | Usage |
|---|---|
| intitle: | Finds pages with the keyword in the title |
| inurl: | Finds pages with specific terms in the URL |
| “keyword” | Exact match for phrases |
| filetype: | Searches for files of a specific format (PDF, DOC, XLS, etc.) |
| after: | Finds pages published or indexed after a date (YYYY-MM-DD) |
| before: | Finds pages published or indexed before a date (YYYY-MM-DD) |
| AND | Includes results with multiple conditions |
| OR | Includes results with either condition |
| – | Excludes pages with specific keywords |
| * | Wildcard that represents any word |
How to use site: search operator for SEO
1. Check if a website is indexed by Google
If you’re unsure whether Google has indexed your site or a particular URL, the site: operator gives you a quick way to find out.
site:yourdomain.comThis will return a list of URLs from your domain that are currently indexed by Google. And if you click on the Tools, you will also see the number of indexed pages:
And if you want to check if a specific URL is indexed, you can just use the URL instead of the domain in the site: search:
site:yourdomain.com/your-page-urlIf the URL doesn’t appear in the results, then it might not be indexed yet. This is helpful when you want to verify indexing without logging into Search Console and then putting the URL into the URL Inspection Tool.
Keep in mind this is not a definitive method for checking how your pages are being indexed – Google sometimes omits URLs from these results, especially on larger sites. Also, I find the reported number often inaccurate. It’s still handy for a quick check (especially if you don’t have Search Console access for the site), but for a complete view of your own site’s indexing status, use the Page Indexing Report in Google Search Console instead.
2. Identify Find Internal Linking Opportunities
Internal links help search engines understand site structure, boost the authority of important pages, and guide users to related content. But manually finding linking opportunities can be time-consuming.
The site: operator makes this easier by finding pages that mention specific keywords, so you can quickly add relevant links to newly published or underperforming pages.
My favorite trick is to use OR operator to broaden the search to include different keyword variations for the anchor text. This is useful because people (and your older content) may refer to the same topic using different terms.
Example:
site:yourdomain.com "electric vehicles" OR "EVs" OR "electric cars"This search finds any page that contains any one of those keyword variations. It gives you a more complete picture of where the topic is mentioned across your site, even if older posts used different terminology.
3. Analyze competitor websites
Want to understand how much content a competitor has or how their site is structured? Use the site: operator to scope out their indexed pages.
This gives a rough idea of the number of pages indexed by Google—helpful for assessing the size and depth of a competitor’s site.
Use site:competitor.com with keywords to analyze your competitor’s content strategy.
This is what I usually check:
- How many pages are indexed with site:competitor.com to estimate the size of the website.
- Check how they organize content in particular site sections. Take e-commerce sites as an example, you can narrow down to product categories (e.g., site:competitor.com/category/) to study how they categorize products
- Identify if they offer downloadable resources such as PDFs, whitepapers, or guides with filetype:pdf or similar.
- Discover whether they’re publishing content across different subdomains (e.g., for support, blog, or resources).
4. Unveil competitors’ content strategy about target keywords
Understanding competitors’ keywords and content strategies can help shape your own. With site: and keyword-based operators like intitle: or inurl:, you can see how they’re using specific terms across their site.
Examples:
- site:competitor.com “accounting software”
- site:competitor.com intitle:”accounting software”
This shows where they mention the term, whether it’s in the title, URL, or structure. You can learn how much content they’ve published on a topic and which pages they’re trying to rank.
You can even emulate their structure while adding your own unique insights to create better, more in-depth content.
5. Filter content by publishing date
Want to know how often your competitor publishes new content? Or whether they’re ramping up efforts around a new topic?
You can combine site: with after: and before: to filter by date and study how frequently competitors update or publish new content.
For example, if you want to check whether a competitor published lots of content in April 2025:
site:competitor.com/blog after:2025-04-01 before:2025-05-01
This helps you anticipate trends, plan content publishing frequency, and get ahead in targeting emerging topics.
Things to keep in mind when using the site: operator
While site: is a powerful tool for quick insights, it comes with a few important caveats:
- Not a complete index list: The results shown are only an estimate. Google may not display every indexed page for the domain or URL pattern.
- Results may be delayed: The index isn’t updated in real time, so newly published or updated content might not appear right away.
- Excludes blocked or noindexed pages: Pages that are blocked by robots.txt or contain a noindex tag won’t show up in site: search results—even if they exist on your site.
- Doesn’t indicate ranking performance: Just because a page appears in site: results doesn’t mean it ranks for any keywords. This operator only confirms if a page is in Google’s index.
