Discovered — Currently Not Indexed: What Google Is Really Telling You
It is not a bug and not a queue. It is a verdict: Google found your pages and decided they were not worth indexing.
Open Google Search Console on a large auto-generated site and you often find a number that stops you: tens of thousands of pages marked "Discovered — currently not indexed." The instinct is to submit the sitemap again, or to request indexing. Both mostly do nothing, because the status is not a queue you can jump. It is a decision.
What the status actually means
"Discovered" means Google knows the URL exists — usually from your sitemap or a link. "Currently not indexed" means Google chose not to crawl and index it yet. On a site with a few thin pages that is a timing issue. On a site with thousands of similar, templated pages it is a quality and crawl-budget verdict: Google looked at the volume relative to the site's authority and decided most of the pages are not worth the crawl.
Twelve search clicks across sixteen thousand pages is not an indexing problem. It is a signal the pages were not needed.
Why more pages make it worse
Every site has a rough crawl budget — how much Google will fetch in a given window. Dump 16,000 near-identical pages into a sitemap and you do not raise the budget; you spread it thinner, so the genuinely good pages get crawled less. Mass generation is the opposite of the fix. It buries the pages that could rank under the ones Google is already ignoring.
What actually moves it
Three things help, none of them "submit again." Prune: cut the sitemap to your best pages so crawl budget lands where it matters. Improve: fewer pages, each genuinely useful, well-linked internally, distinct from one another. Earn authority: real links and a track record make Google willing to crawl more of your site. Indexing follows quality; it does not precede it.
The honest version
A site with 190 pages that mostly index and rank is healthier than one with 16,000 where Google rejected 13,000. The number of pages is a vanity metric; indexed-and-ranking pages are the real one. If Search Console is telling you "discovered, not indexed" at scale, it is not asking you to try harder — it is telling you to make less, better. See also what IndexNow does and does not do.