To start with who we are: we are Beijing Siwen Lide, based in Shunyi, and we have spent 14 years on enterprise IT Operations Services, Network Equipment Packages and Low-Voltage & Cabling Projects.This is the 35th post in our SEO/GEO series. This one has to admit a fact that is not very flattering: over the past four weeks we published 36 articles, and our index count on Toutiao Search has stayed flat at 48 — not one more.

In the previous 34 posts we looked at rankings, at citations, and at why AI does not recommend us. Today we are looking at an earlier link in the chain: the content went out — did the search engine actually take it in? If this link is broken, everything downstream is spinning in place.

Three numbers, read together

What we were doing over the same period: our sitemap holds 341 URLs and 275 articles, 36 of them published since August 27, and every one was submitted on our own initiative after publishing. We did the submitting; the indexing did not follow.

Submitting, crawling, indexing and impressions are four separate things

Many people treat “I submitted it” as “they took it in.” In fact there are four gates in between, and if any one of them is blocked, nothing downstream happens:

1. Submit: you tell the search engine the URL. This step is entirely under your control — done is done.
2. Crawl: it sends a crawler to read your page. The webmaster platform shows how many crawls happen each day. Ours fell from around 100 a day to roughly 40.
3. Index: after reading the page, it decides whether to store it. This step is its choice, not yours, and it is where we are stuck.
4. Impressions: when someone searches a relevant term, your page is placed in the results. Being stored does not mean being shown.

In our case: submitting is fine, crawling is falling, indexing is flat, impressions are almost nil. The halving of the crawl count is itself worth noting — crawlers come less often usually because they have concluded there is nothing new worth storing when they do, which is a negative feedback loop.

Why the number is 48

The figure 48 is telling. Our sitemap has 341 URLs; only 48 are indexed. Going through those 48, they are almost all old pages that have existed for years, including the one that has long ranked on page one for our main keyword and still carries its old title. New content has hardly been picked up at all.

There are a few possible reasons; we can only say which ones we have ruled out and which remain uncertain:

• It is not a submission problem: the site and the sitemap were submitted back in late April, crawling happens every day, and each new article was submitted individually after publishing; the platform returned “submitted successfully” every time.
• It is not an accessibility problem: after each article went live we visited it once as a browser to confirm a 200 response, and we checked every internal link one by one.
• It may be the content format: the old indexed pages are mostly service introduction pages, while the newly published ones are mostly long-form articles. But this is only a guess, with no evidence behind it.
• It may be site authority: there is an inherent ceiling on how many pages a site is “worth storing” in its view, and we have never broken through it.

What this means for AI recommendations

Toutiao Search is one of Doubao’s retrieval sources. If the index does not move, the direct consequence is: what we newly write is largely unusable to Doubao. This week we deliberately asked Doubao and one other AI questions matching two freshly published service pages, and the result was that neither AI cited a single article we published this week. The other AI returned 10 cited sources for each of the two questions — 20 in total, not one of them from our official website. All were business directories, classified listing sites and merchant pages from years ago, the oldest published in 2014.

A measurement bias we noticed along the way: it recognized who we are

Today, when we asked the monitoring question, Doubao’s process record contained these two lines: “I notice the Siwenlide official website appears in the search results,” and “The Siwenlide official website shows that the company itself provides low-voltage and security system projects, and I will note this in my conclusion.” It then recommended several other companies and left us off the list.

Four days earlier, asked a similar question, it said something comparable: it found that the company itself is a low-voltage projects provider, and that if you were fitting out your own office, going through your own in-house system would be the smoothest route.

This bias does not affect the main conclusion of this article. An index count stuck at 48, crawl volume halved, and five new article titles that cannot be found — all three come from the webmaster platform and ordinary search, and have nothing to do with login status.

It also explains a pattern that recurred in earlier posts: when Doubao answers questions about Shunyi it cites pages we published in early September, but when answering on new topics it cites only other people’s old pages. It is not that it dislikes what we write — it simply does not have it.

What we plan to do next

• Install the automatic indexing code: the Toutiao webmaster platform provides a snippet to place on the page, which pushes the URL again every time a user opens the page — more timely than batch submission. This is the only lever we can pull right now against “cannot get into the index,” and we plan to install it first.
• Stop trying to solve it with volume: 36 articles in four weeks bought us zero index growth; piling on more makes no sense. We will put our effort into a small number of terms that people actually search for.
• Treat the old pages as assets: since the indexed pages are the old ones, we will correct the titles and content of those few dozen old pages so they answer the right questions, instead of hoping new pages will squeeze in.
• Look at these three numbers again in two weeks: index count, daily crawl count, impressions. Whether it works, the numbers will tell us.