Why is my website not showing up on Google?

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com, with your own domain and no space after the colon. If nothing comes back, your website is not showing up on Google because Google has not indexed it, and the fix is technical. If pages are listed, Google has them and ranks other sites above yours, and the slower work is on the pages themselves.

Read the result as yes or no. Google says the operator doesn't necessarily return all the URLs it has indexed, so the count means little.

Google's help page for missing pages says many people who think they are not on Google are in fact ranking low. To a customer the two look the same, because almost nobody gets to page two: in Backlinko's analysis of four million Google results, last updated in April 2025, only 0.63% of searchers clicked on anything from the second page.

Add the site to Google Search Console as a Domain property, prove you own it with a TXT record at your domain provider, then paste any address from the site into the inspection bar at the top. URL Inspection answers “URL is on Google” or “URL is not on Google”, and gives the reason.

Do it today. A manually added record can take up to two or three days before your provider starts serving it, and Search Console needs a few days before any data appears.

I read these fields, in this order:

• Page indexing, the verdict and its reason.
• Last crawl. No date means Googlebot has not fetched the page yet.
• Crawl allowed?, Page fetch and Indexing allowed? One “No” or “Failed” is the whole answer. The trap is robots.txt: when it blocks the page, Indexing allowed? always reads Yes, because Google can't see a noindex on a page it isn't allowed to fetch.
• The two canonicals. If they differ, Google is indexing another address in this page's place.

After a fix, Test live URL checks the page as it stands and Request indexing puts it in the queue. Asking twice for the same address won't get it crawled any faster.

“Discovered - currently not indexed” means Google knows the address and has not crawled it yet. Google's Page indexing help says Google typically wanted to crawl the URL but expected that to overload the site, so it rescheduled, which is why the last crawl date is blank. Google has not read the page, so its quality is not yet in question.

“Crawled - currently not indexed” is the harder verdict. Google read the page and left it out, and the same help page says there is “no need to resubmit this URL for crawling”.

With “Discovered”, I look at the site: how quickly the server answers, whether the page is linked from pages Google already crawls, and whether filters, tags or calendar pages are spawning thousands of near-identical addresses that compete for Google's visits. With “Crawled”, I look at the page itself and ask what it says that the site's other pages, or the top results for its search, do not. Not every page gets in, and Google says so: “Don't expect every URL on your site to be indexed.” A tag archive repeating ten product descriptions can stay out. Nobody loses a customer.

When Google isn't indexing a site, I check six faults, the quickest to rule out first: a noindex tag, a robots.txt rule, a wrong canonical tag, text that appears only after JavaScript runs, a new domain nothing links to, and a missing or muddled sitemap. Search Console names the first three outright. The others show up as missing pages, or as pages stuck at “Discovered” or “Crawled”.

A noindex left over from the test site

The tag is one line, <meta name="robots" content="noindex">, or the same instruction sent as an X-Robots-Tag header (Google's noindex guide). Developers put it on a test copy, and it travels to the live site with everything else. WordPress has it as a tick box under Settings, Reading, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”, which since version 5.3 writes a noindex tag into the head of every page (WordPress documentation). A new Shopify store starts in private mode, which hides every page from visitors and search engines until you launch it.

If a site of under a hundred pages returns nothing at all for site:, this is where I look first.

robots.txt

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Disallow: / under User-agent: * tells every crawler to stay out of the whole site. The file controls crawling, and Google's robots.txt introduction calls it “not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google”: a blocked page can still be listed, as a bare address with no description, if other sites link to it. After a fix, allow a day, because Google caches robots.txt for up to 24 hours.

A canonical tag pointing at another page

A canonical tag names the original when several addresses show the same content, so a template that writes the home page's address into every canonical tag tells Google the whole site is one page. Google treats the tag as a strong signal but not a rule, and when it overrides you the page is reported as “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user”. The usual duplicates are dull: http and https, www and the bare domain, a trailing slash. Pick one version of each address, redirect the rest to it and make the canonical agree.

Text that appears only after JavaScript runs

Some sites send an almost empty page and build the text in the visitor's browser. Google crawls, renders and indexes such pages in three stages, and its JavaScript documentation says a page can wait in the rendering queue “for a few seconds, but it can take longer than that”. Google still recommends server-side rendering or pre-rendering, partly because “not all bots can run JavaScript”. Vercel's study of AI crawlers, published in December 2024, found that none of the major ones rendered JavaScript, with two exceptions: Google's Gemini, which runs on Googlebot's infrastructure, and Apple's Applebot. What those crawlers need is in How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT.

Two tests settle it. Run Test live URL in Search Console and open the screenshot: if the text is there, Google can read it. Then press Ctrl+U in Chrome (Option-Command-U on a Mac) and search the HTML your server sends for a sentence from the middle of the page. If the sentence is missing, most AI crawlers never see it.

A new domain that nothing links to

Google finds pages primarily through links from other pages it already crawled. A new domain has none, so it can take a few weeks for Google to notice it. Give it a way in: the Search Console property, a submitted sitemap and a link from a site Google already visits, such as a trade association's member list, a supplier's stockist page or the local chamber of commerce directory.

No sitemap, or a muddled one

Google says you might need a sitemap if your site is new and has few external links, though listing a page doesn't guarantee it gets indexed. The faults I meet are in what the file lists: redirected, noindexed and duplicate addresses beside the real ones. List only each page's canonical address and submit the file once, in the Sitemaps report.

Two rarer causes take a minute each. The Removals tool hides an address for about six months, and a request made during a redesign keeps working long after everyone has forgotten it. A manual action means a reviewer at Google judged pages to break its spam policies; an empty Manual actions report closes that question.

Google says it can take a few weeks to notice a new site, and a day or two to a few weeks for a new page to reach the index. Indexing is the quick part. Ranking for searches other businesses compete for takes months: in an Ahrefs study published in May 2025, fewer than 2% of new pages reached the top ten within a year.

Ahrefs put the exact figure at 1.74%, against 5.7% in its 2017 study, and found that the average page in first place was five years old.

So I plan a new site's first three months around indexing. Google's missing-pages help says to allow at least a week after submitting a sitemap or an indexing request before assuming a problem. I allow two. By then every page that matters should read “URL is on Google”. A page that doesn't has a fault somewhere, and more waiting won't find it. Rankings get their first serious look at three months.

I read a new domain's slow start as a shortage of links rather than a penalty for being young. The published record cannot settle it: Google documents no penalty for a domain's age, and a new domain always starts with no links, so the two causes arrive together every time. A new site with strong links in its first week that still waited months would tell them apart.

Google's page on how Search works gives three reasons an indexed page doesn't appear: the content is irrelevant to what people search for, its quality is low, or a robots meta rule stops it being shown. Relevance is the one I find most often.

In Search Console's Performance report, filter by the page and open the Queries tab. Impressions count how often your site appeared in results, and average position is the average of where your highest result sat. Plenty of impressions at an average position of 11 to 30 means page two or three for real searches: relevant, and beaten. Almost no impressions means the page barely appears for anything, and the words on it are the first suspect.

The page answers a search nobody types

Google's SEO Starter Guide tells you to “think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content”. A single Services page listing eight treatments is a weak match for all eight searches. I would split out the two or three services that earn the most, each on its own page with prices and the questions customers ask on the phone. Amir Hair Clinic, whose site we rebuilt, has one treatments page that links out to an article each on finasteride, minoxidil, FUE transplants and hair loss in women, so each of those four searches has a page written for it alone.

Thin pages

A thin page says nothing the next result doesn't: a manufacturer's description pasted in, or a location page with only the town name changed. Length is beside the point. The Starter Guide says there is “no magical word count target”. A batch of town pages that all funnel visitors to one contact page is what Google's spam policies call doorway abuse.

Nothing local for Google to go on

Someone searching for a business nearby gets local results on Maps and in Search, ranked on relevance, distance and prominence. Prominence takes in how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has, and Google says nobody can pay for a better local ranking. If customers come to you, or you go to them, set up a Business Profile alongside the site; the Google Business Profile guide walks through it.

No links, no mentions

Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages, and wants every page you care about linked from at least one other page on your own site. Internal links take an afternoon. Links and mentions from suppliers, trade bodies, local press and customers arrive slowly, and earning them is the part of SEO that goes on month after month.

1. Search site:yourdomain.com and note whether anything comes back.
2. Add a Domain property in Search Console and put its TXT record in your DNS.
3. Inspect the home page and the page that brings in the most money.
4. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow: /.
5. On WordPress, make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unticked; elsewhere, search the page's code for “noindex”.
6. Submit the sitemap in the Sitemaps report and look again in a fortnight.