Website not showing up on Google? Find out which of four problems it is

Do these in order and stop at the first one that fails.

Treat site: as a quick test only. Google says the operator "doesn't necessarily return all the URLs that are indexed" (Google Search Central). The answer that counts is in Search Console.

Not comfortable reading page source? The free website audit checks titles, descriptions, headings, HTTPS, speed and mobile for you.

These are the reasons Google gives in the Page indexing report. The names and meanings are quoted from Search Console Help. The fixes are what we would do.

Repeated server errors cost more than a missed visit. Google says 5xx errors make its crawlers "temporarily slow down with crawling", and pages that were already indexed are kept at first "but eventually dropped" (Google Search Central).

On canonicals: Google calls rel="canonical" "a strong signal", not a command (Google Search Central). Your other signals need to point to the same URL.

These can hide an entire site at once, and most are left over from building it:

• WordPress's "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" box. It is under Settings → Reading. When it's ticked, WordPress (since version 5.3) adds a noindex,nofollow robots meta tag to your site's head (WordPress.org). It gets left on after launch all the time.
• A staging robots.txt that went live. User-agent: * followed by Disallow: / blocks everything.
• noindex and a robots.txt block on the same page. This works the opposite way to what most people expect. Google says that for noindex to work, "the page or resource must not be blocked by a robots.txt file" (Google Search Central). If Googlebot can't crawl the page, it never sees the noindex. Use noindex to keep a page out of results, and robots.txt only to stop crawling.
• A plugin, theme or SEO-settings change that added noindex to the whole site. Check the page source after any update.
• A firewall, security plugin or CDN challenge that turns Googlebot away. The site loads for you, but URL Inspection's live test fails. Before you block a crawler, check that it really is Google with a reverse DNS lookup, or against Google's published IP ranges (Google Search Central).
• Canonicals or redirects still pointing at an old domain or staging URL after a migration. See our guide on redesigning without losing SEO.
• A manual action. Open the Manual Actions report in Search Console. Affected pages can be "ranked lower or omitted from search results" (Search Console Help). It's rare for an honest small business, but it takes a minute to rule out.

Hosted builders have their own switches, and these override anything you do in Search Console:

Once the setting is fixed, connect the site to Search Console and submit the sitemap the platform generates.

Google gives no fixed date. In its own words, "It can take a few weeks for Google to notice a new site" (Google Search Central), and once you ask for a recrawl, "Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks" (Google Search Central).

Agency estimates are in the same range. AIOSEO says a new site's homepage "usually appears within 1 to 4 weeks" of submitting a sitemap, and "Inner pages can take 2 to 8 weeks" (AIOSEO, updated August 28, 2026). That is one company's experience, not a promise from Google.

What you can do to avoid extra delay:

1. Verify the site in Search Console as a Domain property. It "aggregates data for all subdomains, protocols, and subpaths", so http, https, www and non-www are reported together (Search Console Help).
2. Submit your sitemap. Google says "A sitemap helps search engines discover URLs on your site", though it doesn't guarantee every URL gets crawled and indexed (Google Search Central).
3. Request indexing for your key pages in URL Inspection. Choose carefully: "there's a quota for submitting individual URLs", and "requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL won't get it crawled any faster" (Google Search Central).
4. Link every important page from your homepage or main menu, so Google can find it by crawling.
5. Get a few genuine links to the site, such as your Business Profile, a trade association, suppliers or clients.

If site: lists your pages, Google has them, and the problem is where they rank. You are in a very large group: in an Ahrefs study of around 14 billion pages (December 1, 2023), "96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google."

The usual causes on a small business site:

• The page targets no real search. A title like "Home" or "Welcome" tells Google nothing. A title that names the service and the place matches what people actually type.
• One page tries to cover every service. Give each main service its own page, with its own title and heading.
• Thin content. Two paragraphs rarely beat a competitor's page that covers prices, process, areas served and common questions.
• A weak mobile page. "Google uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking" (Google Search Central). If the phone version is cut down or broken, that is the version Google judges.
• Nothing that shows you are real: no area served, no real work shown, and no other sites linking to you.
• You are checking from the wrong place. Results change by location. Search Console → Performance shows the searches you actually appear for, and in which countries.

If you are showing up but nobody gets in touch, that's a different problem. Read why a website gets no enquiries.

For a search on your business name, Google often shows a Business Profile panel first. That's not a fault. Make it work for you:

• Claim and verify your Google Business Profile, then fill in the website field. Google asks you to "Enter the full URL, which includes 'http://' or 'https://'" and to "Make sure that Googlebot isn't blocked on your site" (Google Business Profile Help).
• Use the same business name, phone number and area served on the profile and on your website.
• If another company with a similar name shows up instead of you, make your own details easy to confirm: a verified profile, the same details everywhere, and Organization structured data on your site.

AI search uses the same basics as ordinary search.

• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: Google says "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." A page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet" (Google Search Central). If you are not indexed, you are not in AI Overviews either.
• ChatGPT search: OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot crawler is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features." "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers", and "it can take ~24 hours" after a robots.txt update for OpenAI's systems to adjust (OpenAI). Check that neither your robots.txt nor your firewall blocks it.
• What helps with both: a plain answer near the top of each page, clear headings, and facts a tool can quote, such as what you do, where you work and how to reach you.

Still not sure which of the four problems you have? Run the free website audit. It shows your score for security, speed, Google SEO and mobile in about 30 seconds, and a developer then emails you a free, plain-English fix plan within one business day, with no obligation. If the fix is a rebuild, our pricing is shown in your currency.