From published page to searchable page: the real sequence
1. Publication
Your CMS or website makes the page publicly accessible. At this stage the URL exists, but a search engine may not yet know that it exists.
2. Discovery
Search engines can discover a URL through internal links, external links, XML sitemaps, previously known pages and submission mechanisms. Faster discovery can reduce the idle time between publishing and crawler awareness.
3. Crawl
A crawler requests the page and evaluates whether it can access and process the content. Robots restrictions, redirects, server errors and rendering issues can interfere here.
4. Indexing
After crawling, the search engine decides whether the URL belongs in its index. A submitted URL can still remain unindexed if the search engine sees technical, duplication, canonical or quality issues.
5. Ranking
Ranking is a separate stage. Submission speed does not replace relevance, authority, content quality, internal linking, backlinks or technical SEO.