36 Posts in Four Weeks, Toutiao Index Count Stuck at 48: Submission, Crawling, Indexing and Display Are Four Separate Things (2026)
September 23, 2026
Three numbers on the webmaster platform: the indexed count has not moved in four weeks, daily crawl counts have been halved, and impressions have been frozen since the end of August. Searching Toutiao with the exact titles of this week’s five new posts returns nothing at all, while control keywords behave normally. This post explains why submission, crawling, indexing and display are four separate things, why we are stuck on the third, and a self-test bias we noticed along the way: when you ask an AI with your own account, it can tell who you are.