Two weeks and change now, and Googlebot still has not made a single regular crawl of my new URLs. when I first raised this, the original URL had been sitting seven days waiting for its first fetch. That number has only grown.

URL Inspection now says "URL is unknown to Google." No referring sitemap, no last crawl date. The same URL is sitting in a submitted, successfully processed XML sitemap. earlier the inspection showed "Discovered - currently not indexed" and did list the sitemap, so the reports don't even agree with each other. neither has ever shown a last crawl. Other new pages on the domain are in the same boat, some published even later.

Existing pages could not behave more differently. Updating one and requesting indexing gets regular Googlebot on it in roughly 15 to 30 minutes. Those are the same pages that link directly to the new URLs, which makes it stranger.

Since the first post, I've checked:

Production HTML: nav links, contextual internal links, sitemap entries and canonicals all use the identical canonical URLs.
Responses: new URLs return 200. Trailing slash and .php variants redirect straight to the canonical.
Indexability: self-referencing canonicals, index/follow, no blocking X-Robots-Tag, robots.txt allows crawling.
Server logs: daily logs show successful Google-InspectionTool fetches, zero regular Googlebot hits on the new pages. The inspection tool traffic gets counted separately and is not the same thing.
Crawl stats in Settings: both hosts say "No problems." The export has no 403, 429 or 5xx categories and no obvious overall crawl decline.
Redirects: just HTTP/www normalization and one old page redirecting to its replacement.

the crawl report shows around 580 requests over three months including resources. Almost all of it is refresh, only a couple percent discovery.

Pushed a Google Business Profile post linking to the new page too. Still no first crawl recorded.

for comparison, a page published on an entirely separate domain got a visit about 15 minutes after submission. That was a job listing though, so not a fair fight.

This is a small site, not some generated URL farm. Roughly 2,000 impressions in Search Console over three months.

I get that sitemap submission and indexing requests guarantee nothing. what I want to know is whether anyone has hit this exact pattern and actually fixed it: existing pages recrawl on demand, multiple new URLs on the same domain sit without a first crawl for weeks. Concrete diagnostic steps or a real resolution would help. This is about the first regular crawl, not ranking or exclusion afterward.

Replies on the original thread went a few directions:

Someone found the gap between inspection fetches and real Googlebot interesting. Since the new pages are linked from pages that do get crawled fast, they wondered whether Google had discovered the URLs but just wasn't scheduling a crawl yet.
Another person said two weeks is unusual if the config is clean, and suggested looking at crawl demand rather than crawl accessibility. Add stronger internal links from high-authority pages, earn an external backlink to one of the new URLs, and confirm in logs that Googlebot isn't being rate-limited. Sometimes Google just defers low-priority new URLs regardless of sitemap and indexing requests.
One reply was blunter: if the structure is fine and it isn't keyword stuffed, Google can decide a similar page is better. AI pushed everyone to pump out volume, and they see it constantly with newer clients. Same stuff, different titles. If rankings haven't dropped since the spam update, just move on.