Why is my website not showing up on Google?

A website that doesn't appear on Google isn't necessarily broken. Sometimes Google simply hasn't found it yet; sometimes one setting tells it to stay away. Here's how to work out which situation you're in and what to do about each.

How to check if your site is on Google

The first test takes ten seconds: search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If no results come up, the site isn't indexed. If only a few pages appear, the rest aren't yet. Google warns that this search doesn't always show every indexed page, so treat it as a quick check, not an exact one.

The exact check is in Search Console, Google's free tool for site owners. Once you've proved the domain is yours (usually with a DNS record), you get two useful things:

• URL Inspection: enter a page's address and see whether it's in Google, when it was last crawled and what's wrong with it.
• The page indexing report: a list of pages that aren't indexed, grouped by reason.

The most common causes

The first three are the most common on new sites. Many platforms have a "discourage search engines" option that's ticked while the site is being built and stays ticked after launch. On WordPress it's under Settings → Reading; on Squarespace and Wix, look for a password or "hide from search engines" setting.

How long a new site takes

Google says it can take a few weeks to notice a new site or changes to an existing one. Usually you don't need to do anything: Google finds sites on its own by following links from other sites. A new site with no links pointing to it takes longer.

You can speed things up in three ways:

1. Submit your sitemap in Search Console. It's the list of all your pages, usually at /sitemap.xml.
2. Request indexing for your home page from URL Inspection. Google says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and that requests are subject to a quota: submitting the same URL again won't make it faster.
3. Link to your site from places Google already visits: your Google Business Profile, your Facebook and Instagram pages, and the directories for your industry.

What the page indexing report tells you

Search Console gives a reason for each page that isn't indexed. The ones you'll see most often:

Not every page needs to be in Google. Redirects, URLs with tracking parameters and thank-you pages after a form can all be missing without any harm.

When Google chooses not to index

If pages show as crawled but not indexed and there's no technical cause, Google read them and didn't find a reason to include them. In July 2026, on Google's Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller said that when Google's systems are seriously worried about a site's quality, they index fewer of its pages. His advice: when you see a large pattern of unindexed pages with no technical cause, step back and think about the quality of the site overall.

For a small business site, that usually means pages with very little text, copy lifted from other sites, or dozens of near-identical pages ("Plumber in Brooklyn", "Plumber in Queens"). A few good pages, each with its own information, do more than many thin ones.

Indexed, but not on page one

Indexed means Google has the page in its database, not that it shows it first. Search for your business name: if your site appears, it's indexed correctly. For searches like "coffee shop Austin" or "dentist near me", you're competing with every other business, and Google picks based on how well the page answers the search, how well known the business is and, for local searches, distance and reviews.

What helps a local business most:

• a complete Google Business Profile that links to your site;
• a separate page for each important service, with text saying what you do, where and for how much;
• your name, address and phone number written the same way on the site, the profile and directories;
• real reviews, with replies.

The same things help you show up in AI assistants' answers; the details are in how to show up in ChatGPT and Google's AI answers.

What doesn't help

• Paid "Google submission" services. Google says it doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher.
• Requesting indexing every day. Requests are rate-limited, and repeating them changes nothing.
• Bought links. They break Google's rules and can get a site removed from results.
• Dozens of auto-generated city or neighbourhood pages. Without content of their own, Google sees them as low quality.

If your site was rebuilt and dropped out of Google after launch, the cause is almost always old addresses that no longer lead anywhere; the steps are in how to redesign a website without losing SEO.

The sites we build launch with a title and description for every page, a sitemap, structured data and pages generated ahead of time as text Google reads easily. The details are on our web design page.