Your website does not appear on Google, the five causes in diagnostic order and the search that tells them apart in ten seconds

Start with one search, because it splits the problem in half before you spend an hour on the wrong half. Type site: followed by your domain, with no space, into Google. If results come back, your site is in the index and the real question is ranking. If nothing comes back, your site is not in the index and the question is discovery. Those are two different problems with two different sets of causes, and people routinely spend a week on the second while having the first.

Google Keyword Planner reports 170 searches a month in the United States for this group of phrasings, read on 31 October 2026 against the United States geo target, counted as the group maximum rather than the sum of the phrasings.

Cause one, the site is too new and nothing links to it

A brand new domain with no inbound links has not been discovered. Google's own documentation on asking for a recrawl sets the expectation plainly, as read on 31 October 2026: "Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks." Nothing is wrong with the site. It has not been visited yet.

The fix is to be findable rather than to keep asking. Verify the domain in Search Console, submit a sitemap, and get at least one link from a page that is already crawled regularly, which can be your own social profile or a legitimate industry listing. Then measure the wait in weeks. The one diagnostic worth running at this stage is whether anything at all links to the domain from outside it, because a site with no inbound link and no sitemap has given a crawler no route in.

Cause two, the site is telling Google not to index it

This is the cause worth checking second because it is the most common one on a site somebody else built, and because the check takes ninety seconds. View the live page source and search it for the word noindex. Then fetch your own robots.txt in a browser and read it. Then look for the platform setting with the friendly name, which is usually a discourage search engines checkbox or a coming soon mode left switched on after launch.

Run all three against the live site rather than against the content management system, because what the server returns is the only version that counts. This is a diagnosis rather than a tutorial: if one of the three is blocking, you have found your answer and the remaining four causes on this page do not apply.

Cause three, the page is crawled and Google has chosen not to index it

If the site query returns some pages but not the one you care about, this is where you are. Search Console reports it under a status with a specific wording, and it is a decision rather than an error. Our page on crawled, currently not indexed, the two sentences Google publishes and the five causes you can diagnose yourself works through that branch in detail, and it is the right next read if this is your situation rather than one of the others on this page.

The short version is that thin pages, pages that duplicate another page of yours, and pages nothing on your own site links to are the three patterns that produce it most often. All three are fixable by you, with no tooling.

Cause four, the site is indexed and you are searching for the wrong thing

This is more common than the three above put together, and nobody likes it. If the site query returns your pages, you are indexed, and the real situation is that you are ranked lower than page one for the phrase you tried. Two habits make it look worse than it is.

Searching for your business name while logged in, from your own office, on a connection Google associates with you, gives you a personalised result that tells you nothing about what anyone else sees. And searching for a competitive category phrase on a six-week-old site and concluding that the site is broken confuses a ranking position with an indexing failure.

Use Search Console's performance report instead of searching by hand. It tells you the queries you are already appearing for and the average position for each, which is the actual answer to the question you are asking. A page sitting at position 34 for a phrase is not missing. It is in the queue.

Cause five, the wrong version of the site is the one in the index

A site can be fully indexed under a URL you are not looking at. The four candidates are the version with www and the version without, the http version and the https version. If they do not all redirect to one canonical choice, Google may be indexing one while you are checking another, and a site query on the one you expect returns little.

Pick one as the real one, make the other three redirect to it with a permanent redirect, and verify the domain property in Search Console so you are reading all variants at once. The same problem has a cousin on sites with a staging subdomain that was never blocked, where the staging copy outranks production for the brand name.

The diagnostic order, in one list

• Run the site query. Results means ranking, no results means indexing
• Read the live page source for noindex, and read robots.txt in a browser
• Check the platform's own search visibility setting
• Confirm which URL variant is canonical and that the other three redirect
• Verify the domain in Search Console and submit a sitemap
• Only then look at content, links and position

Work top to bottom and stop at the first thing that is wrong, because fixing two causes at once leaves you unable to say which one it was. When you reach the reporting stage, the six fields that decide whether a Search Console chart means anything is worth reading before you draw a conclusion from a graph.

Questions about a site not appearing on Google

How long should a new site take to appear

Google documents crawling as taking a few days to a few weeks, and indexing is a separate decision after crawling. For a small new site with a sitemap and one inbound link, think in terms of two to four weeks before drawing any conclusion.

The site query returns my home page and nothing else. What does that mean

Discovery reached the home page and stopped, which almost always means your internal links are built in JavaScript that the crawler did not execute, or the inner pages are not linked from anywhere. Put plain links in the HTML navigation and the rest of the site follows.

I can find my site but not when I search my own business name

Check that the business name appears in your title tag and your home page text, that your Google Business Profile is verified if you are a local business, and that no other business shares the name. A name that is also a common word is a ranking problem rather than an indexing one.

Does paying for Google Ads help my site get indexed

No. Advertising and organic indexing are separate systems and buying one does not influence the other. If somebody has told you otherwise, that is a sales line rather than a mechanism.

The site query shows pages I did not expect, like a staging copy

Then two versions of your site are in the index and they are competing with each other for your own brand name. Pick the real one, make the other return a permanent redirect to it or a password prompt, and the duplicate drops out. This is cause five wearing a different coat and it is more common after a launch than anybody admits.

My site disappeared after a redesign. Where do I look first

At the URLs. A redesign that changed URL structure without redirects has created a site full of new pages with no history, and the old addresses are returning errors. Map old to new and redirect, before touching anything else.

The second index, which has no site query

There is a place your business can be equally absent with no console to tell you. When somebody asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews who to buy from in your category, the answer names a handful of businesses and most owners have never checked whether theirs is among them. There is no site query for that, no coverage report and no submission form. AI Knows Us runs the check and shows which pages the answers were built from, which is the one diagnosis on this page you cannot do yourself with a browser.