How public pages get indexed

NearbySpy is a marketplace, which means a meaningful share of new Investigators and Clients arrive through search engines. This article explains which pages on NearbySpy are public, how they get discovered, and how indexing interacts with the strict privacy boundaries around your Case data.

What is public

The public surface of NearbySpy includes the homepage, marketing and pricing pages, location and category browse pages, individual Investigator profile pages, the Help Center, and the blog. These pages are written to be useful to anonymous visitors and are intentionally indexable.

What is never public

• Cases, Operations, Evidence, Subjects, comments, and messages.
• Client portals and shared transcript pages.
• Account and settings pages.
• Anything behind authentication.

These surfaces require an authenticated session and are explicitly excluded from indexing in our robots and meta directives. See Privacy basics for Cases and Evidence for the underlying access model.

How indexing works

NearbySpy publishes a sitemap that lists the canonical URLs for the public pages search engines should know about. Search crawlers fetch the sitemap, then crawl the listed URLs respecting the rules in our robots file. Each public page declares its canonical URL, structured data where appropriate, and meta tags that tell crawlers how to title and describe the page in results.

Location and category pages

Many of the most-visited pages on the marketplace are city, state, and category browse pages — for example, listings for a particular city or for a particular specialty. These are generated from real Investigator inventory and are designed to rank well for "private investigator near me" style queries. Read Understanding location browse pages for the logic that powers them.

Investigator profile pages

Each Investigator's public profile is indexed individually. The profile shows display name, agency, badges, specialties, gallery, and verified reviews. It does not show any Case data. Investigators control most of what appears via their settings — see Investigator settings overview. For how those reviews are sourced and moderated, see How reviews work on profiles and in the dashboard.

Help Center and blog

Articles in the Help Center and posts on the blog are indexed under their respective namespaces. The two serve different audiences and rarely compete for the same queries — see Blog posts vs Help Center documentation.

What you can do as an Investigator

1. Complete your profile fully. Filled-out profiles rank better and convert more inquiries.
2. Add accurate specialties and service areas so your profile shows up on the right location browse pages.
3. Encourage Clients to leave verified reviews — they influence search ranking and trust signals.
4. Consider Featured placements where they make sense — see Featured placements in directory and search.

What you can do as a Client

If you arrive from a search engine and are not sure where to start, read What NearbySpy is (marketplace + operations) and How Investigator search and filters work. Both explain how to evaluate the Investigators you see.