My Website Is Not Showing Up on Google: Five Things to Check

You paid for a website. You type your business name into Google, and it isn’t there. Or the homepage is there, but the page about your main service is nowhere.

“My website is not showing up on Google” is a different problem from your business not showing up on the map. The map is your Google Business Profile, and we covered that in Why Is My Business Not Showing Up on Google? This post is about the website itself: whether Google has found it, read it and kept it.

Here are five things to check, in order.

1. Find out whether Google has your site at all

Go to Google and search site: followed by your web address, with no space. For example, site:yourbusiness.com.

Google’s own SEO starter guide puts it simply: “If you see results pointing to your site, you’re in the index.”

If you see your pages, Google has them, and the problem is where they rank, not whether they exist. If you see nothing, or only the homepage, keep going.

2. Look for a setting that hides your site

Many website builders have a switch that tells search engines to stay away. It’s often turned on while a site is being built and never turned off.

Technically it adds a noindex rule to the page. Google says that when it sees that rule, it “will drop that page entirely from Google Search results.” Google also notes that if you use a builder “such as Wix, WordPress, or Blogger,” your builder “might have a search engine settings page.”

So open your site’s settings and look for anything about search engines, SEO or visibility. Make sure your live pages are allowed to appear.

One more file can block Google: robots.txt. If a page is blocked there, Google says “the crawler will never see the noindex rule” or anything else on it. If you didn’t set one up, ask whoever built your site.

3. Set up Search Console and read the indexing report

Google Search Console is free, and it’s the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your pages. Its Page indexing report lists each page with a reason. The two you’ll see most:

“Discovered – currently not indexed.” Google says: “The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet.”

“Crawled – currently not indexed.” “The page was crawled by Google but not indexed.” Google adds that it “may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.”

You may also see “URL marked ‘noindex’” (go back to step 2) or “Alternate page with proper canonical tag,” which Google says means “there is nothing you need to do.”

Google is also plain that “Don’t expect every URL on your site to be indexed.” The goal is your important pages, not every page.

4. Give Google a way in: link your pages

Google’s starter guide says it “primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled.” A page nothing links to is hard for Google to find, even if it’s in your menu on a page Google hasn’t read.

This happened to us. In October 2026, Search Console showed two of our own pages, our Arvada web design page and our Ops Playbook page, as “Discovered – currently not indexed.” Google knew they existed and hadn’t read them. Our fix was links: from the homepage, from the services page and from the footer on every page.

For your site, make sure each service page is linked from your homepage and from at least one other page. And put your web address everywhere your business already appears online, so there are more paths in.

5. Request indexing, then wait

In Search Console, the URL Inspection tool lets you check a single page. You can run a live test of the page, and Google says “You can request that an inspected URL be indexed by Google.”

Do it once per page. Google says “requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL won’t get it crawled any faster,” and there’s “a quota for submitting individual URLs.”

Then be patient. “Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks,” and Google says a request “does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all.”

A sitemap helps Google see your full list of pages. Google suggests one if you “have large numbers of URLs,” and its starter guide says it “isn’t required.” For a small business site, the links in step 4 matter more.

The takeaway

When your website isn’t showing up on Google, work through it in order. Check site: first. Turn off anything that hides the site. Read Search Console’s reason for each page. Link your important pages from your homepage. Request indexing once, then give it a few weeks.

Be careful with anyone who promises your site will show up by a certain date. Google says there’s “no guarantee that any particular site will be added to Google’s index.”

If you’d like a second set of eyes, a Compass Audit is a free 30-minute look at your website, your Google listing and a real search, done on a call with you. We’ll run the site: check together and work out what to fix first.

---