We checked 70 job postings for Indexing API eligibility

14 August 2026 · 6 min read · data measured 14 August 2026

If you run a job board, you have something almost nobody else in SEO has: a search engine that will genuinely take a hint from you. Google runs an Indexing API, and job postings are one of only two kinds of page it works for. Everyone else's pages are accepted and then ignored.

That only helps if your listings are set up so Google can recognise them as job postings in the first place. We wanted to know how often they are, so we checked 70 real listings across six boards.

How we checked

A job page tells Google "I am a job posting" through a block of hidden, machine-readable information in the page: the title, the company, the date it was posted, where the role is based. Google reads that block. Applicants never see it.

We requested each listing the way a search engine does on its first visit, and looked for that block and the details Google requires inside it.

Board	Listings checked	Marked up as jobs	Complete
Jobicy	10	10	10
Remotive	12	12	12
Wellfound	12	12	12
Arbeitnow	12	12	12
Built In	12	0	0
We Work Remotely	12	could not reach	—
Total reachable	58	46	46

Finding one: the boards doing it are doing it properly

Every single listing that identified itself as a job posting was complete. All 46 of them, across four unrelated boards. Nothing missing, no expired postings still claiming to be open.

That is a better result than we expected, and it is worth saying plainly because the easy version of this article is "here is what everyone gets wrong". Whatever is slowing these listings down, it is not sloppy setup.

We got this wrong the first time. Our first attempt concluded that job boards mostly ship no markup at all. That came from checking their search and category pages rather than the individual job pages. Those pages have no job markup for good reason: they are not jobs. Checking the wrong kind of page produced a confident, tidy, completely backwards answer, which is a decent argument for publishing your method next to your numbers.

Finding two: one board's listings look empty until the page loads

Built In was the exception. Twelve listings, all reachable, and not one of them told a search engine it was a job posting.

The information is not missing. It is added by the page's own code after the page arrives. Open the same listings in a real browser and wait a moment, and it is all there:

Built In listings	Recognised as a job
As delivered to a search engine	0 of 6
After the page finishes loading	6 of 6

Google does eventually run that code, so this is not fatal. But it turns one step into two, and the second one happens on Google's schedule rather than yours. If the whole reason you care about the Indexing API is closing the gap between publishing a role and it showing up in search, then leaving a delay in the middle of that gap is an odd place to end up.

It is also invisible. The page looks perfect to you, to your team and to every applicant. You would only ever find it by asking what a search engine receives, which is different from what you see.

You can check your own listings in a few seconds with our job posting checker. It reads what gets delivered, not what appears afterwards, which is the whole point.

The one we could not check

We Work Remotely refused all 12 of our requests, including from an ordinary browser.

We are not going to tell you what that means. Sites block automated traffic all the time, and that says nothing about how they treat Google, which arrives as a verified crawler and gets treated differently. It is in the table as a blank because it happened, not because it proves anything.

So what actually slows job listings down?

On this evidence, not the setup. Which leaves the ordinary causes, and those are the ones you can only see by watching what Google does with your pages over time:

Nothing links to the listing. A role that only exists in your sitemap is a role Google has been told about but given no reason to prioritise. Across the sites we monitor, pages with at least one internal link get indexed noticeably more often, though the gap is smaller and messier than the headline suggests.
The role closes before Google gets there. Taking a filled role down is correct. Doing it before the page was ever crawled means you paid for the listing and got nothing from search. You can only know which is happening if you know the date each listing was first indexed.
The same role in five places. Posted to several boards plus your own careers page, those pages compete with each other. Google picks one to show, and it is frequently not yours.
Volume against attention. Thousands of listings, each live for a fortnight, is a genuinely hard problem, and it is the one the Indexing API was built for.

A note on the sample

Seventy listings across six boards is small, and four of those boards agree with each other completely, which is exactly the shape that produces overconfidence. Treat 46 out of 46 as encouraging rather than settled, and treat the Built In result as a fact about one site on one day. The checker behind it is free and public, so you can disagree with us using your own pages.