Getting indexed on Search & Browse (2024)

This guide is to help you understand how games & other projects appear on ourSearch and Browse pages. If you're not seeing your project where you expect itto be, then this guide may help you.

We'll answer some common questions like:

• Why can’t I find my page on search?
• Why don’t I see my project in Most Recent?

Please read through this guide before reaching out for help.

Publishing vs Indexing

Publishing is making your project publicly visible.

Indexing is when itch.io makes your project available on our Search andBrowse pages (aka our “Discovery Pages”). A quick way to checkif your project is fully indexed is to enter your project’s full title in thesearch box.

Note: Projects that use generic or very short titles may be difficult tosearch for due to how generic their name is. If you want to ensure yourproject can easily be found by name, try a more unique name. Titles thatare a single letter or a single common English word may limit your project’sdiscoverability in search even if it is indexed.

Some indexing operations may hapen asynchronously, so it may take some time foryour project to appear on the search pages as our backend processes the page.If you just made a change you may want to check back in an hour or so if youdon’t see what you expect.

Publishing

Publishing a project is simple and can be done by the project creator (oranyone who has permission to edit the page). From the project’s edit page,scroll to the Visibility & access section located at the bottom and selectthe Public option. After saving your page, your project is published.Published projects can be accessed by anyone from your profile page, directlyby URL, and your followers can find the project in their feeds & emailnotifications.

Getting Indexed

Indexing is generally available to all developers, assuming your account is ingood standing and you aren’t abusing or creating low-quality pages. In order tobe indexed, there are a few baseline requirements:

• Your project must be published by selecting the Public option mentioned above.
• You haven’t limited access to the page via the Public access settings. If you select either “Disable new downloads & purchases” or “Unlisted in search & browse” then you are opting out of being eligible for indexing.
• You have a cover image uploaded on your page.
• Your project is available for purchase, download, or is playable in the browser. Empty or placeholder pages will not be indexed. (Although, if you create devlog entries, then those will be indexed if the page is public.)

Additionally, please review our Quality Guidelines forspecific rules about how you should and shouldn’t use your itch.io page.Creating spammy pages, using disruptive imagery, purposefully being obnoxious,faking comments/views/downloads, abusing tags, or having confusing ormisleading instructions/content may result in a moderator deindexing your page.This type of moderation is rare and happens at the discretion of our team forvery clear offenses. Please be respectful of the people who may be visitingyour page and you shouldn’t have any issues. If you feel like you may have beenaffected please contact us through our support page.

There are also some scenarios where your page must be viewed by a moderatorbefore it can be indexed. The most common case is for new sellers: If you'vejust created an account and you're selling your first project, then yourpublished page is placed in a queue for review. We generally review thesewithin a few business days after a project is published. Although your page maynot be indexed during this time, it is still published and fully functional viayour profile and URL. We recommend distributing your page as normal, asactivity to the page can help prioritize it in our review queue. We appreciateyour patience for this step. Established sellers with no history of issues willskip this review step and will be indexed immediately. If you have anyquestions or need to be expedited, then please contact us through oursupport page.

There are a few other automated checks (e.g., our spam detector) which maydelay your page from being indexed. If you find your page isn’t immediatelyindexed, then we ask that you wait a bit before reporting it. As always, apublished page is fully functional and accessible directly by URL and from yourprofile. We recommend immediately telling your audience about your page as soonas it’s published, even if it may not be indexed yet. This will help yousurface in our browse pages when it does become indexed.

Why isn’t my project showing up?

Here’s a quick list of things to review if you're having trouble finding your project.

• First, verify that your project is indeed unindexed: Search for it directly by full name. If it appears, then your project is indexed.
  • If you have a very generic or very short project name (e.g., 1 letter or a single common English word), it may make it difficult or impossible to search for. You may want to consider changing the name of your project to something more specific.
  • If your project does appear in search by direct title search but you're not happy with where it appears on browse or other queries, then see ‘Maximizing the visibility of your project’.
• Ensure that your project is published: From the edit page, in the Visibility & access section, select the Public option.
  • If you use any of the Public access settings to limit availability, then you are opting out of being indexed.
• Ensure you have a cover image uploaded.
• Ensure you have files uploaded to the project page. Your page must be purchasable, downloadable, or playable in the browser to be indexed. Empty placeholder pages will not be indexed.
  • If you want to make your up-and-coming project discoverable through itch.io, then use our Devlogs feature. Those are indexed even if no files are uploaded.
• If your project is marked NSFW, it will only appear to people who have NSFW browsing enabled.
  • People who don’t have accounts on itch.io default to having NSFW off. Someone must be logged in and enable NSFW to discover that content through search & browse.
• If you're selling your first project, then your page may be placed in our review queue. New sellers are reviewed before their projects are elgible for indexing. This proces may take a few days. Please contact us only after you've waited at least one day.
• Your page may be marked for review by one of our internal checks designed to prevent abuse. If you just published the page, please wait at least a day before contacting us.

If you've gone through all the following and you believe your project stillisn’t indexed, then please contact us through our support page.

Maximizing the visibility of your project

The best way to maximize the discoverability of your project is to accuratelyprovide information for all the sections on your project dashboard, includingthe Metadata tab. The more ways you classify your project, the moreopportunities your project will have to appear in front of someone. The primaryway of doing this is through our free-form tagging system, but you can alsospecify things like multiplayer support, languages available, and accessibilityoptions. It’s important to be accurate. Abusing the tagging system may resultin your page being deindexed entirely.

Using our devlogs system is another good way to get more people to know aboutyour project. Post about updates, new features, and other things you're workingon. Devlog posts are distributed to our users through email digests and more.It may help you get new followers and people interested in your project.

Encourage people to follow you, and add your project to collections. Theseactivities can boost your reach on itch.io, giving you instant visibility whenyou launch something new or put out an update.

Tell people about your itch.io page as well! Getting real people to visit yourpage and interact with it can help your page rise up on our browse pages. Thiscan lead to even more people discovering your project and it growing even more.

Limitations of Text-Search

As a platform, getting search right can be challenging. We have to optimizebetween all developers wanting their projects to appear versus showing relevantresults to people looking for something.

Based on understanding how our search engine is used, there are generally twotypes of searches on itch.io:

• Direct title search: Someone is looking for something specific and types in the name of the project.
• Topic search: Someone wants to browse games by topic to find something new to play.

Our search engine is optimized for Direct title search since that is howthe majority of people use search. For users who are browsing for new games, wetry to push them into our browse pages with tags, which are surfaced on the topof the search results. This means that the text in the body of your projectpage and any tags you add will not become search queries for your project.Tags are only for our browsing pages, which are separate from search.

We know every developer would want to have their game show up on top whensomething related to their project is typed in, but there are too many projectsto give that to everyone. To handle this, we try to provide a more organized wayfor people to get their games discovered through our tags system.

Or search results algorithm is constantly evolving and changing. If you feelthere’s something about our search that is broken, then please reachout, but please be understanding if your game isn’t appearing for aphrase or word that isn’t the exact title of your game.

FAQ

Can you update the “publish date” of my project? My page got indexed later/I just updated it.

The publish date is set when you publish your project; we will not change yourpublish date. You may use devlogs to announce a large update, and that maycontribute to how your page is ranked.

Often developers reach out to us about updating their publish date because theywant to appear on the top of Most Recent. Ouranswer to this is: Recently released is a very bad place to launch yourproject! We sometimes get hundreds of games added per day, depending on therecently released list is not an effective way to get your game discovered. Werecommend instead that you invest your energy in promoting your game on anychannels that you have access to. Encourage your friends and followers to checkout and share your page, and that will have the most impact on how it appears onitch.io.