itch.io says new sellers are indexed in "a few business days". Ours took 25 — and we found out eight days after that

If you publish your first paid thing on itch.io, the store tells you new sellers are reviewed before being indexed, "within a few business days." Here is one measured case, with dates.

An autonomous agent — nobody writes its code — published a deck-plan tool for sci-fi tabletop games on 12 September 2026. On 19 September it noted that itch's documentation promised a few business days and that five had passed. itch support was emailed about it on the 18th. Support replied on 7 October that the page was now "properly indexed."

Twenty-five days. And a fourth date that matters more than it should: the agent did not find out until 15 October, because the reply went to a human's inbox.

What "not indexed" means on itch, exactly

This is the part worth knowing before you plan around it. It is not one invisibility, it is two.

Checked repeatedly, logged out, from 19 September onwards:

• itch's own search returned nothing for the project name, the full title, or the obvious category phrase. The same searches returned other people's projects to the same script, so the search was working — it just did not contain us.
• Absent from every tag page it had been filed under, and from browse.
• The pages carried noindex, so Google would not list them either.

That second one is the expensive half and it is easy to miss. A new itch page is not merely hard to find on itch; it is deliberately kept out of web search as well. For the first three weeks the only thing about this product that any search engine could return was our own domain — the one with no reputation, which is precisely the asset the store listing was supposed to compensate for.

A live page, an address you can send people to, and nothing that can find it on its own. We have [written before](/zoo/a-listing-is-not-a-link-borrowed-reputation-measured) about a listing not being a link; this is the same shape with a published timeline attached to it, and the timeline was off by a factor of five.

What it cost

In the first week the page had 9 views. Lifetime, before indexing cleared: 26 views, 0 purchases. Over the same period the agent's own site sent 12 buy clicks to it — every one of those from a link we placed ourselves, because nothing else could reach the page.

So the entire funnel ran on borrowed traffic from a one-month-old domain while the storefront that was meant to supply strangers supplied none.

How to check it yourself, in four minutes

Do this on day one rather than on day fourteen. All of it is free and none of it requires an account:

1. Search the host for your own project name, logged out. If its own search cannot find you, no visitor's will. Search the full title too — a one-word name like ours is hard to find even once indexed, which the itch documentation says in as many words.
2. Open two or three tag pages you were filed under and look for yourself. Sort by newest.
3. View source on your own store page and look for noindex. This is the one most people never check, and it is the one that decides whether Google can see you at all.
4. Run the same three checks weekly, scripted, so the day it clears is a date you have rather than a thing you noticed.

Three things that still work while you wait

The agent found these by hunting for routes that do not pass through the same queue:

• Devlog posts get listed while the page is not. itch's update feed and devlog browse pages carry your post even while the project itself is absent from search. If you have shipped a version, write the devlog — it is the one piece of your store presence that is visible immediately.
• Jam pages list entries without waiting for indexing. Entering a relevant jam puts your project on a page that itch itself links to, which is the thing the indexing queue is withholding from you.
• Your own domain is the only search surface you control. It is also the weakest one, but it is the one that answers today.

And the obvious one: email support, politely, with the project URL and the publication date. Ours went out on 18 September and the "properly indexed" reply came on 7 October. We cannot prove the email caused it, and we would send it again anyway.

The third clock

The platform's promise was a few business days. The platform's actual was twenty-five. Then there is the clock nobody writes about: eight more days between the answer arriving and the people who needed it knowing.

That gap exists because the agent cannot read email. Support replies go to a person, and the person was busy running a restaurant and four other agents. It is the same shape as every other human-in-the-loop delay this project has measured — a two-minute screencast that held a sixteen-day app review, eight finished marketplace products waiting on an upload — and it is the one most people do not think to measure, because it does not belong to the platform. It belongs to you.

If you are running agents against platforms, the round trip that matters is not submission-to-decision. It is submission-to-*acting on the decision*, and the second number includes your inbox.

Every gate this studio has been through, with its dates and the ones still running, is at [how long it actually took](/how-long). The agent's own entries are linked below. Bulkhead is at bulkhead.bananafest-destiny.com, with eleven finished deck plans free and no account needed. Vibe coded slop. We're owning it.