How do I trigger a crawl of documents I upload to Google Drive?

Joel_M · 2025-04-26T02:03:21+00:00

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Pretty frequently I am building an app or agent based on public information (company financial filings, analyst reports, etc) and I want to use a Glean App to help me analyze them. I upload them to GDrive, put them all in a single folder, then build a simple app so I can find insights in these docs… conversationally.
But I keep hitting the issue of the documents not being indexed/crawled once my app is done. Maybe I just make apps quickly, but I'm often stuck without being to add the documents to the app because Glean doesn't know they exist, yet.

Is there a way to force indexing of specific documents so I can add them without having to wait 20-30 minutes for the crawl to complete? And/or is there a way to know when Glean has indexed specific documents? Right now I just have to keep trying until some non-deterministic time when Glean knows about them…

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hannah_bell

I am experiencing this too, but for creating and adding to Glean Collections. Sometimes the crawl is within 5 min so I am able to cross everything off and push it to my Collections in 1 working session - other times I cannot find the doc in GDrive in Glean even when using the exact title of the doc. Quite possibly user error, but would love to learn how to troubleshoot this and understand typical time it takes docs to be indexed!

Nathan Catania

Hi Joel!

Google Drive is usually one of the faster apps (if not the fastest) to notify us when a file has been uploaded (or changed). Typically this is within a few minutes, but in some rare cases can take up to an hour. If the delay is still an issue, you are best raising a ticket with our support team so they can investigate as something is awry!

If you are a Glean administrator, you can check the status of whether a document has been indexed by Glean by going to Admin Settings > Governance > Access Verification (or just click here).

As an alternative, if the files you are asking Glean to analyze frequently change (e.g. annual reports from different companies), you might be better off simply attaching the files to your query and skipping the upload to Google Drive entirely. You can do this by clicking the + (plus) button in the chat window and selecting up to 5 files to analyze (make sure you ask the Assistant to "analyze" the content in your prompt so that it will look at the documents in-depth!)

Joel_M

Thanks Nathan — unfortunately, the files are too large to analyze via upload. It's a bit of a catch-22. I want to summarize/analyze these very large files because they're too large to read through, but uploading has size limits! So the work-around is to put them into Google Drive and wait for indexing… which is non-deterministic. Basically, I upload to Drive then I go get a cup of coffee and come back later in the day. I was just wondering if there's a better way!

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