Why Is My Website Not Showing Up on Google?

Start with one search

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google, replacing the domain with your own. This asks Google to list every page it holds for your site.

If nothing comes back, Google has not indexed the site, or has been told not to. That is the first three causes below.

If pages come back, the site is indexed and the problem is ranking, not visibility. Skip to the last section. This is the most common outcome for anyone who searched their company name and found competitors instead, and it is a different problem with a different fix.

The site: operator is not perfectly complete, so treat an empty result as a strong signal rather than proof. Confirm it in Google Search Console, which is free and which you should set up properly before doing anything else on this list, because every further diagnosis depends on it.

Cause 1: the site is too new

Google finds new sites by following links from sites it already knows. A site nobody links to yet can sit undiscovered for weeks. This is not a fault; it is how discovery works.

The tells: the domain is under a month old, you have not submitted a sitemap, and Search Console shows the pages as "Discovered, currently not indexed" or does not list them at all.

The fix: verify the site in Search Console, submit an XML sitemap, and use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for the homepage and the two or three pages that matter most. Then get one or two real links pointing at the site. A Google Business Profile, a listing in an industry directory, and your social profiles all count. Expect days, not hours, and do not resubmit the same URL repeatedly; it does not speed anything up.

Cause 2: something is telling Google to stay out

This is the cause that turns out to be the answer surprisingly often, especially after a redesign or a migration. Developers hide a site from search engines while it is being built, and the setting survives the launch.

There are three places to look, and a site can have any combination of them:

• robots.txt. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, the whole site is blocked from crawling. A correct robots.txt almost never disallows the root.
• A noindex tag. View the source of your homepage and search for noindex. If it appears in a <meta name="robots"> tag, Google is being told to drop the page from its index. This also arrives as an HTTP header, X-Robots-Tag: noindex, which you will only see in Search Console's URL Inspection or in your browser's network panel.
• A platform switch. WordPress has a "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" checkbox under Settings, then Reading. Squarespace, Wix, Webflow and Shopify all have an equivalent. Staging environments are frequently launched with it still on.

Search Console's Pages report names the exact reason: "Blocked by robots.txt", "Excluded by noindex tag", or "Page with redirect". Fix the one it names, then request indexing again. Removal takes minutes; re-inclusion typically takes days.

One related trap: a password-protected site, a site that returns a login page to visitors, or a site whose hosting blocks unknown bots will show as "Blocked due to access forbidden (403)" or "Server error (5xx)". Google cannot index what it cannot fetch.

Cause 3: Google fetched it and declined

Search Console has two statuses that people find baffling: "Crawled, currently not indexed" and "Discovered, currently not indexed". They mean Google saw the page and decided it was not worth adding, or not worth fetching yet.

This is usually a quality or duplication judgement rather than a technical fault. Thin pages, near-duplicate pages, pages with no unique content, or a large site with hundreds of pages nobody would search for all trigger it. We have written separately about why pages are crawled but not indexed, because the fix is editorial rather than mechanical: fewer, better pages, each answering something specific.

A brand-new business site with five pages is rarely rejected this way. A site that was generated in bulk often is.

Cause 4: it is indexed, just not where you are looking

If site: returns your pages, the site is on Google. It simply is not ranking for the search you tried.

Check two things. First, search your exact company name. If your own site does not rank first for its own name, something is genuinely wrong, and it is almost always one of the causes above applied to the homepage specifically, or a much larger business sharing the name.

Second, be honest about the query. "Web design" is competed for by every agency on earth. A three-month-old site will not appear on page one for it, and no setting changes that. The site is visible; it is competing in a category where being visible takes time, links, and content that answers something the incumbents do not. That is search intent and authority work, not a fix.

If the site used to rank and then vanished, that is a different situation again, and the diagnosis follows a traffic-drop procedure: check for a manual action in Search Console, then a recent site change, then a core update.

The ten-minute sequence

1. Search site:yourdomain.com. Pages returned means go to step 6.
2. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow: /.
3. View the homepage source and search for noindex.
4. Check the platform's "discourage search engines" switch.
5. Open Search Console's Pages report and read the reason it gives; then submit a sitemap and request indexing for the homepage.
6. Search your exact business name. If you are not first, treat the homepage as a step-2-to-5 problem.
7. If the site is indexed and ranks for its name but not for your target terms, the problem is competition, not visibility.

Most sites that "do not show up on Google" are resolved at step 3 or 4. If you have been through all seven and Search Console still will not explain itself, book a call and we will look at the actual crawl data with you.

Common questions