--- title: "Pagination and infinite scroll: what Google actually indexes in 2026" url: https://seomadman.com/research/pagination-infinite-scroll-indexing section: research published: 2026-08-01T00:00:00.000Z modified: 2026-08-01T00:00:00.000Z author: Adam Hafez topics: ["Technical SEO"] --- # Pagination and infinite scroll: what Google actually indexes in 2026 ## The short answer Google confirmed in March 2019 it had stopped using rel="next" and rel="prev" as an indexing signal years before that announcement. Google's documentation states Googlebot does not trigger scroll or click events, so infinite scroll content with no discrete URL behind it stays invisible to Search. Google's documented fix: give each content chunk a unique URL, paired with the History API. ## Key takeaways - Google Webmasters confirmed on March 21, 2019 that rel=next/rel=prev had not been used as an indexing signal for years, and retired the markup entirely. - Google's current pagination documentation states plainly that Google no longer uses these tags at all, though other search engines may still use them. - Google's crawlers generally don't trigger JavaScript functions that require user actions, including scrolling, to update page content. - Google's lazy-loading guidance says content should load on viewport visibility, not on a scroll or click event. - Google's documented fix for infinite scroll is a unique, persistent URL per content chunk, updated with the History API, not abandoning infinite scroll. Two claims get repeated constantly in technical SEO advice, and both trace back to real, dated statements from Google rather than to inference: rel=next/rel=prev has done nothing at Google for years, and infinite scroll can quietly hide content from the index unless it is built a specific way. Neither is a guess. Both are things Google has said, in writing, more than once. ## Rel=next/prev's real deprecation history The pagination markup rel="next" and rel="prev" was introduced by Google in 2011 to hint that a sequence of component pages belonged to one series. On March 21, 2019, Google Webmasters (the account now known as Google Search Central) announced it was retiring the tags as an indexing signal, and added a detail that mattered more than the retirement itself: Google had not actually been using rel=next/prev for indexing "for a number of years" before that announcement. The signal had quietly stopped mattering long before anyone said so publicly, a sequence documented at the time by [Search Engine Roundtable](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rel-prev-next-change-27295.html). Google's own current documentation confirms the same position without hedging. Its [pagination best practices page](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/pagination-and-incremental-page-loading) states it directly: "Google no longer uses these tags, although these links may still be used by other search engines." That single sentence is the entire status of rel=next/prev at Google today. Leaving the markup in an existing site does no harm, since Bing and some other crawlers still treat it as a discovery hint, but adding it now for Google's benefit accomplishes nothing. What Google asks for instead is unglamorous and structural: a unique URL per page, sequential `` links between them, and a canonical tag on each page pointing at itself rather than at page one. ## Infinite scroll's real indexing risk, and Google's real fix Infinite scroll fails for a more basic reason than pagination markup ever mattered: Googlebot does not scroll. Google's own [JavaScript SEO documentation](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics) states that its crawlers "generally don't trigger JavaScript functions that require user actions to update the current page contents," and names scrolling and clicking specifically as the kind of interaction it does not simulate. A page that only loads its next batch of content when a human scrolls to the bottom is, from Googlebot's perspective, a page that stops after the first batch. Google's [lazy-loading guidance](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/lazy-loading) is just as direct about why: "Google Search does not interact with your page," so any loading mechanism gated on a scroll or click listener never fires for it. The fix Google documents is not to load content on scroll at all, but to load it based on viewport visibility, using the IntersectionObserver API or an equivalent, which fires independently of any user action Googlebot would have to fake. That handles content visibility, but it does not by itself solve indexing, because a page that still lives at one URL cannot be linked to, cited, or ranked as its later chunks separately. Google's documented fix for that half of the problem is the one worth building to: give each content chunk its own unique, persistent URL, its example is a page parameter like `?page=12`, and call the History API to update the visible URL once that chunk becomes the primary content on screen. That is not a workaround bolted on by SEO practitioners; it is Google's own stated recommendation for making infinite scroll compatible with indexing at all, and it is the same underlying requirement rel=next/prev was trying, and failing, to serve a decade earlier: a discrete, crawlable URL behind every distinct piece of content. ## Why we care Both claims collapse to one requirement, and it has not changed even as Googlebot's own rendering ability has: content needs a real, discrete URL to be indexed as its own thing. Rel=next/prev never changed that requirement, it was markup layered on top of URLs that already existed, which is exactly why Google could drop it silently for years before anyone noticed. Infinite scroll without real URLs violates the requirement directly, not through a markup gap but by never giving Googlebot a URL to land on for the content past the first load. The practical fix is the one Google itself documents: unique URLs per chunk, discovered through normal links rather than a scroll event, with the History API layered on top for the user experience. Anything built that way gets both the paginated URL structure engines have always needed and the continuous-scroll feel users expect, without betting indexing on Googlebot doing something its own documentation says it does not do. ## Frequently asked questions ### Does removing rel=next/rel=prev hurt rankings today? No. Google's own pagination documentation states it no longer uses those tags at all, a position it says predates its March 2019 announcement by several years. The markup is inert at Google; it can still be left in place harmlessly for other search engines, but it does nothing for Google indexing either way. ### Can Googlebot see content loaded by infinite scroll at all? Only if that content is reachable another way. Google's own documentation says its crawlers generally don't trigger scroll or click events to load more content, so scroll-only content with no separate URL is invisible to it. Content triggered by viewport visibility, or backed by its own paginated URL, is a different case and is indexable. ### What is Google's own recommended fix for infinite scroll? Give each loaded chunk a unique, persistent URL, Google's documentation uses a page-number parameter as its example, and update the visible URL with the History API once that chunk becomes the primary content on screen. That keeps the scrolling experience while giving Googlebot a discrete URL to crawl and index for each chunk. ## Sources 1. [Pagination Best Practices for Google](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/pagination-and-incremental-page-loading) - Google Search Central (primary) 2. [Fix Lazy-Loaded Content](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/lazy-loading) - Google Search Central (primary) 3. [JavaScript SEO basics](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics) - Google Search Central 4. [Google Now Says Rel=prev/next Is Not An Indexing Signal Anymore](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rel-prev-next-change-27295.html) - Search Engine Roundtable 5. [Infinite scroll search-friendly recommendations](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly) - Google Search Central Blog