Why is my website not showing up on Google, and how do I fix it?

A website not showing up on Google is almost always one of four things: Google has not found it yet, something on the site is telling Google to stay away, Google found it and decided not to index it, or it is indexed and simply ranks too low to see. Each has a different fix, and the first job is working out which one you have.

Most people skip the diagnosis and go straight to "SEO", which is how a crawl problem gets treated with blog posts for six months.

How do I check whether Google has my website at all?

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google, with your own domain and no space after the colon. The results are a rough sample of the pages Google holds for your site.

• No results at all: Google has not indexed anything. The problem is discovery or a block, covered in the next two sections.
• Some pages, but not the one you care about: that page specifically is missing. Check it with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.
• Your pages appear: you are indexed. Your website is not showing up on Google for your search terms because it is not ranking, which is a different problem with a different fix, covered further down.

The site: search is a quick check, not an audit. For the real answer, add your site to Google Search Console, verify it, and open the Page indexing report. It lists every URL Google knows about and the reason each one is or is not in the index.

Why is my new website not showing up on Google yet?

Google finds pages by following links and by reading sitemaps. A brand new domain has neither: nobody links to it yet, and Google has no reason to visit. That is normal, not a fault.

What helps:

1. Submit a sitemap in Search Console. Most site builders (Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, WordPress with an SEO plugin) generate one automatically at /sitemap.xml. You only need to tell Google where it is.
2. Request indexing for your most important pages with URL Inspection. There is a daily limit, so spend it on the home page and your main service pages, not every blog post.
3. Get a few real links. Your Google Business Profile, your social profiles, a local directory you are genuinely listed in, a supplier or partner who mentions you. Links are still how Google decides a site is worth visiting often.

Be patient in weeks, not hours. A new site can take anything from a few days to several weeks to appear, and there is no paid way to skip the queue.

What on my site could be blocking Google?

This is the cheapest problem to fix and the most painful to miss, because the site looks perfect to you while it tells Google to go away. Check these three things in order.

A noindex tag. Many builders have a setting called something like "hide from search engines" or "discourage search engines", switched on while the site was being built and never switched off. It adds a noindex instruction to every page. In the Page indexing report this shows as URL marked 'noindex'. Turn the setting off, then request indexing again.

robots.txt. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, the whole site is closed to crawlers. That line is common on staging sites and sometimes gets copied to the live one.

A password or a login wall. Google cannot index what it cannot load. Store builders often put a password on the site until launch, and forgetting to remove it is more common than anyone admits.

If none of these apply, check that the site loads on its main address without errors. A site that only works on www. while Google was given the other version, or one whose SSL certificate has expired, can fail quietly.

Google crawled my page but did not index it. Why?

This is the status that confuses people most, because nothing is technically wrong. The Page indexing report shows two versions:

• Discovered, currently not indexed. Google knows the URL exists but has not crawled it yet. On a small site this usually just means Google has not prioritised it.
• Crawled, currently not indexed. Google fetched the page and decided not to add it, for now. Google's own wording is that it "may or may not be indexed in the future".

Google is explicit that it "doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page", even when the page follows all of its rules. Among the common reasons it gives for not indexing is that "the quality of the content on page is low".

In practice, for a small business site, "low quality" rarely means badly written. It usually means thin or duplicated: a service page with three sentences, ten location pages that differ only in the city name, a product page copied from the manufacturer. What actually moves this status:

• Make each page answer one question properly, with detail only your business could give.
• Merge near-identical pages into one strong page.
• Link to the page from your home page or main menu, so Google can see you consider it important.
• Earn a few links from outside, which tells Google the site is worth its time.

Re-requesting indexing on an unchanged page does nothing. Change the page first.

My site is indexed but I can't find it on Google. What now?

Then the problem is ranking, and it is worth being honest about what that means. Searching your own business name should find you within days of indexing. Searching "web designer in Pune" or "dentist near me" puts you against every established business in your area, and a new site with no links and no reviews will not win that on day one.

What moves ranking for a local business, roughly in order of effort:

1. A complete Google Business Profile. For "near me" searches the map results come first, and they come from your profile, not your website. Fill in every field, choose the most specific category, and keep your hours right.
2. One page per service, each answering what a buyer actually asks: what it costs, how long it takes, what is included, which areas you cover.
3. Consistent facts everywhere. The same name, address, phone number and service list on your site, your profile and every directory.
4. Reviews and links earned over time. There is no shortcut here, and anything sold as one is a risk to the whole domain.

The same groundwork is what gets a business named by AI assistants, which read the pages search engines have already indexed, and why AI assistants do not mention your business walks through that side. The note on AEO vs SEO covers what changes and what does not.

A five-minute diagnosis, in order

Work down the table and stop at the first failure. It is almost always the first thing that is wrong, not the fifth.

Where this studio stands

Every site we build ships with the indexing groundwork done and checked on the live domain: sitemap submitted, no leftover noindex, one clear page per service, and structured data that states plainly what the business is. The answer engine optimisation page explains how that same foundation gets a business quoted by assistants as well as found in search.