It has said "Validation started" for two months. Is Google still checking?

You did everything the interface asked. Search Console named a problem, you fixed it, you pressed Validate fix — and Google wrote back, sounding almost brisk. This is the second paragraph of the confirmation email, word for word, from one that actually arrived:

From Google’s confirmation email

Validation can take a few days; we will send you a message when the process is complete.

That was two months ago. The issue’s page still shows the same strip — Validation started, with a date that keeps drifting further into the past. No progress bar, no update, no second email. Just “Started”, every time you look.

So: is Google still checking? Almost certainly yes. But that turns out to be the less useful of the two questions hiding in this wait. The other one — did my fix actually work? — has a better answer.

How long it is supposed to take

The email said a few days. Google’s help page for the Page indexing report says, three separate times:

Google’s help page

Validation typically takes up to about two weeks, but in some cases can take much longer, so please be patient.

And out in Google’s own support forums, “much longer” has been measured: forty-five days and still “Started”, ten weeks and still pending, a product expert calmly noting that more than three months is possible. One owner, ten weeks in, asked how to get their validation “unstuck” — as if the thing had jammed. It hadn’t. Slow is not a malfunction here; slow is the design. This has been the shape of things for years: the oldest threads asking the same question date back to 2019, and new ones were still appearing this January.

Here is the part that actually settles the question: nothing was ever due. No page of Google’s documentation names a deadline, a maximum, or an expiry for validation. A check that has run for two months isn’t overdue, because “overdue” isn’t a state that exists here. The likeliest explanation is also the most boring one: Google re-reads your pages at whatever pace it normally visits your site, and for a small site that pace tends to be slow.

What the silence does and doesn’t mean

While the check runs, the row will say “Started” — or occasionally “Looking good”, which means some pages have been re-read and every one of them was clean so far. Those are two of six states the whole journey can pass through; the other article lays them side by side.

But notice what’s missing. For as long as the strip says “Started”, Google is telling you nothing about your fix. Not “it’s working so far”, not “we see your change”, nothing. Two months of “Started” and two days of “Started” contain the same amount of information about the thing you actually did.

There is exactly one real signal buried in a long wait, and it’s a modest one. Google’s own definition of “Started” is that no page has been caught still carrying the issue — and its help page says the check stops when it finds one. A validation still running is therefore a check that hasn’t caught a failing page yet. Mildly good news — and the only news, because the same screen covers all three of these situations:

• Likely Google is just slow. The affected pages haven’t been re-read yet. Nothing is wrong, with your site or with your fix — the queue simply moves at Google’s pace, not yours.
• Check today Your fix didn’t land everywhere. Some pages may still be showing Google a saved, older copy of themselves, or the setting didn’t cover the pages you thought it did. The report will sit silent for months before it tells you this. Checking it yourself takes thirty seconds — that’s the next section.
• No fix exists There was never anything to fix. Some reasons aren’t faults. “Crawled — currently not indexed” means Google read the page and chose not to list it; there is no broken rule for a validation to confirm you repaired. These checks routinely end in “Failed” — on schedule, at no cost to your site. If that’s your reason, stop watching this row; that string gets its own article soon.

From inside the report, those three are indistinguishable. That is the real cost of the wait — not the time, the silence.

Can you hurry it?

No. Nothing in Search Console makes a running validation finish sooner, and the button you’re most tempted to press is the one Google’s help page specifically asks you to leave alone:

Google’s help page, on the one thing not to do

Do not click Validate fix again until validation has succeeded or failed.

The other tempting button is Request indexing, over in URL Inspection. It asks Google to consider one page sooner; nothing anywhere says it moves the validation queue.

What you can do is watch the check work. Open the issue and click See details — the validation view breaks the batch down into pages still waiting and pages that have failed so far. If the waiting side shrinks between your visits, the check is alive and moving. That view is the closest thing to a progress bar this process has; the strip on the issue page will never show you any of it.

What to do with the wait

Check your fix yourself, today. Pick one of the affected pages — the issue’s own page lists examples — paste its address into URL Inspection at the top of Search Console, and press Test live URL. That reads the page as it is right now and shows whether your change is actually on it — the tag gone, the setting off. A clean result doesn’t guarantee the validation will pass, but a dirty one ends the mystery on the spot: the fix never landed, and no amount of waiting was going to change that.

Decide whether the issue deserves a daily visit. The same two questions as when the email first arrived: are the affected pages ones you care about, and is the reason one that needs a person? A validation inching toward its verdict on a handful of leftover pages is not worth a daily refresh.

Then let it run. If the pages check out by hand and the issue matters, the remaining wait is Google’s bookkeeping, not your problem. Nothing gets worse while the row says “Started” — the pages it covers were already off Google’s list before you pressed anything. And a corrected page doesn’t wait for the paperwork either: it can return whenever Google next re-reads it, whether or not the strip has caught up. Best of all, there is nothing to come back for. Google’s page promises it plainly — “You will receive a notification when validation succeeds or fails” — so the ending will find your inbox. Open See details when curiosity wins, not on a schedule.

The verdict Google never gives

Search Console’s validation has two endings — passed or failed — and an open-ended silence before either. What it will never say is the third honest thing: “we can’t tell yet.” After two months of “Started”, that third verdict is the one you’re actually living with; the interface just has no words for it.

And that is worth naming, because the question you care about — did the thing I changed work? — was never really a question about Google’s queue. It’s a question about your pages: what they said before, what they say now, and whether the difference is the one you intended. The live test hands you half of that today — what a page says right now. The other half is memory: what the page said before you touched it — and nothing in this report keeps that for you. That, and not the waiting, is the real gap in this whole story.

Written by Oleh Koval at Specia1ne, who reads these reports for a living.