Why your website isn't showing up on Google
If your site is live but nothing comes up when you search for it, the cause is almost always one of six things — and the first one needs no fixing at all, just time. Here is how to find out which it is in about two minutes.
First, find out whether Google has your site at all
There is a difference between Google not knowing your site exists and Google knowing but not ranking it. Check which situation you are in before changing anything.
- Search Google for site:yourdomain.com (no space after the colon). If pages are listed, you are indexed — skip to the ranking section below.
- If nothing is listed, open Google Search Console, paste a page URL into the inspection bar at the top, and read what it says. It will tell you plainly whether the page is indexed, excluded, or has never been seen.
- If you don't have Search Console set up, that is the first job. It is free, and without it you are guessing.
1. The site is simply too new
A brand-new domain is usually not indexed for somewhere between a few days and a few weeks. Nothing is broken. Submit your sitemap in Search Console and request indexing on your most important pages — that is the whole fix.
2. Google has never been told the site exists
Google finds pages by following links and reading sitemaps. A new site with no inbound links and no submitted sitemap can sit unnoticed for a long time. Submit the sitemap, and get at least one real link pointing at the domain — a supplier, a directory, an association, a social profile.
3. Something is actively blocking it
This is the most common self-inflicted cause, and the most common leftover from a build. Two settings quietly keep a site out of the index, and both are easy to forget after launch.
- A noindex tag on pages that should rank. Staging sites normally carry one, and it sometimes survives going live.
- A robots.txt file disallowing crawlers. Check yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow: /
- A password or holding page in front of the real site.
- On some platforms, a single “discourage search engines” checkbox does all of the above at once.
4. It is indexed, but ranking too low to see
This is the situation most people are actually in, and it is a different problem with a different fix. Your site is in the index; it is just behind everyone else. Search your own business name and you will usually find it immediately. Search a competitive service term and you won't.
Ranking depends on relevance and authority, and a new site has very little of the second. The answer is unglamorous: pages that clearly match what people search for, a complete Google Business Profile if you serve a local area, real reviews, and links earned over time.
5. You are searching for the wrong thing
Searching your own business name tests almost nothing — Google personalises results for you, and you may be the only person who searches it. Test the phrase a stranger would type: the service plus the city. Use an incognito window, because your own history distorts what you see.
6. You rebuilt or moved the site without redirects
If a redesign or migration changed your URLs and nobody mapped the old ones to the new, every page Google knew about now returns a 404. Rankings disappear with them. Redirecting the old URLs to their closest new equivalents recovers most of it, and the sooner the better.
Showing up and ranking are not the same thing
Most guides on this question blur the two, which is why the advice often misses. Being indexed is a technical state — either Google has your page or it doesn't, and you can check it in a minute. Ranking is a competition, and it takes months rather than days. If you are indexed, no amount of resubmitting will move you up; only better pages and genuine authority will.
The launch checklist, so this doesn't happen again
Everything below is what should happen in the first week of any new site going live:
- Verify the site in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap.
- Confirm there is no leftover noindex tag and that robots.txt is not blocking anything you want found.
- Give every important page a unique title and description written for a person, not a keyword tool.
- Create or claim your Google Business Profile if customers come to you locally, and complete every field.
- Make sure each page is reachable by a link from somewhere else on the site. Orphaned pages get crawled last, if at all.
- If the site replaced an old one, redirect every old URL and then watch Search Console for 404s.
- Check the mobile version properly on a phone. Google indexes that version, not the desktop one.
How long before you see anything
Indexing: days to a few weeks. Appearing for your own business name: usually soon after indexing. Appearing for competitive service terms: three to six months of consistent work, and longer in a crowded market. Anyone promising faster than that is selling something — and we say the same thing on our own SEO page.
If you would rather not work through this list yourself, it is part of what we do on every plan: the technical setup, the Google Business Profile, and the pages that earn rankings over time.