My new website is not showing up on Google — what is actually going on

Getting found7 September 202615 min read

Short answer: there are three completely different problems that look identical from where you are sitting. Google has not crawled your site. Google crawled it and did not index it. Or Google indexed it and it is ranking too low for you to find. The fix for each one is different, and the fix for the third one is not technical at all. Work out which you have got before you pay anybody to fix anything — the first check takes about thirty seconds and costs nothing.

Three states that feel the same

Almost every panicked “my website is not showing up on Google” conversation is really one of three situations, and they get muddled because the symptom is identical: you search, you are not there.

• Not crawled. Google has never fetched the pages. It cannot show what it has not seen. This is the normal state of a brand-new domain that nothing links to.
• Crawled but not indexed. Google fetched the pages, looked at them, and has not put them in the index. Sometimes that is a deliberate signal on your site telling it not to. Sometimes it is Google’s own judgement.
• Indexed but ranking too low. The pages are in Google. They are just on page four for the search you tried. Nothing is broken. This is by far the most common case, and it is the one nobody wants to hear.

The order below moves from cheapest check to most expensive. Do not skip ahead. A surprising number of firms pay for “SEO” to fix a problem that turns out to be a tick box left on by the person who built the site.

Check one: the site: search

In Google, type site: immediately followed by your domain with no space — for example, site:yourfirm.co.uk — and press enter. Google will show you pages it holds from that domain and nothing else.

If pages come back, you are indexed. Whatever else is wrong, it is not an indexing problem, and you can stop worrying about robots files and sitemaps entirely. Skip to the ranking section further down.

If nothing comes back, you are in state one or state two, and the next check tells you which. One caveat worth stating so nobody over-reads the result: this is a rough indicator rather than an audit. It shows you what Google will show you at that moment, not a certified inventory of the index.

Check two: Search Console URL Inspection

Google Search Console is free, it is Google’s own tool, and every website you own should be verified in it. Once the domain is verified, paste a page URL into the inspection bar at the top of any Search Console screen. Google’s help page for the tool (About the URL Inspection report and test) explains what comes back: whether the URL is on Google, why it could or could not be indexed, and a rendered view of how Google’s crawler saw the page.

Read the answer literally. The same page is careful to point out that “URL is on Google” does not actually guarantee your page will appear in search results — the report does not check every condition. It tells you about crawling and indexing. It does not tell you about ranking, and no tool does.

What the statuses actually mean

Two phrases from the Page Indexing report cause more confusion than the rest of Search Console put together, so here they are in Google’s own words. “Discovered — currently not indexed” means the page was found but not crawled yet; typically Google wanted to crawl it but expected that to overload the site, so it rescheduled. “Crawled — currently not indexed” means the page was crawled but not indexed, and — this is the part people miss — it may or may not be indexed in the future, with no need to resubmit the URL.

That second status is genuinely uncomfortable, because there is no button that fixes it. It is Google saying it has seen the page and is not convinced it is worth keeping. On a five-page trade site the honest response is usually to make the pages substantially more useful rather than to resubmit them a fourth time.

Asking for a recrawl

The inspection tool lets you request indexing for a URL. Use it once for each important page after launch, then leave it alone. Google’s documentation on asking Google to recrawl your URLs is unusually blunt about the limits: crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks; there is a quota on individual URL submissions; and requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL will not get it crawled any faster. It also states that requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all.

Check three: robots.txt and a stray noindex

These are the two ways a website tells Google to go away, and both get left switched on by accident more often than anyone in the trade likes to admit — usually because the site was blocked deliberately while it was being built and nobody unblocked it on launch day.

robots.txt is a file at yourfirm.co.uk/robots.txt. Type that address into a browser and read it. A line reading Disallow: / means crawlers are being told not to fetch anything. Google’s introduction to robots.txt describes the file as a way to manage crawler traffic, and says plainly that it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google — a blocked page’s URL can still appear in results, just without a description.

noindex is the one that actually removes a page. It is a tag in the page code or an HTTP header, and Google’s documentation on it states that when Googlebot crawls the page and extracts the rule, Google will drop that page entirely from search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it. That is the whole mechanism. One line of code, complete removal, no warning.

There is a nasty interaction between the two worth understanding, because it explains a lot of stuck sites. The same page notes that for noindex to work, the page must not be blocked by robots.txt — if the crawler cannot access the page, it never sees the noindex rule. So a site that is both blocked and marked noindex can sit in limbo: Google cannot read the instruction to remove it, and cannot read the page either. Fixing one without the other changes nothing visible for weeks.

Ask whoever built the site, in writing, one question: is there a noindex tag or a disallow rule anywhere on this site, and if so why. Anyone competent answers in a sentence. The URL Inspection tool will also tell you directly, which is why it is check two rather than check five.

Check four: does anything link to you at all?

This is the check people skip, and for a brand-new trade website it is frequently the real answer. Google’s own explanation of what sitemaps are for spells out the mechanism: crawlers find the web by following URLs on pages they have already crawled, so if your site is new and no other sites link to it, Googlebot might not discover your pages at all.

A sitemap helps — and that same page is careful to say it helps Google discover URLs but does not guarantee that everything in it will be crawled and indexed. A sitemap is a request, not an instruction. It is also worth noting that Google describes a small site as roughly 500 pages or fewer, and says such a site is often fine without one if it is properly linked internally. A ten-page site with a sitemap and no inbound links has done the easy half of the job.

The practical fix for a trade business is not link building in the horrible sense. It is: put the website address on your Google Business Profile, on your Facebook page, on any trade association or supplier listing you legitimately hold, and on any directory you already pay for. Those are real, honest, findable references to your site, and they are how a new domain stops being invisible. The wider version of this argument is in getting found on Google as a Kent trade business, and the profile side specifically in how to show up on Google Maps.

Check five: is an old copy of the site still live?

A quieter problem, and an ugly one when it happens. Sites are usually built on a temporary address — a staging or preview URL — and then moved to the real domain. If the temporary copy is still publicly reachable and was never blocked, you now have two versions of the same site on the internet, and Google has to decide which one is the real thing. It does not always pick yours.

The symptom is distinctive: search a long, unusual sentence from your homepage in quotation marks. If a result comes back on an address that is not your domain — a preview subdomain, a builder’s demo address, an old holding site — that is your competitor, and it is you. Ask for it to be taken down or blocked properly. While you are there, check whether the old website is still sitting on the old address too. A surprising number of firms end up competing with the site they thought they had replaced, which overlaps with the reasons an old site stops bringing in work.

If your site is on Squarespace, Wix or another builder

This deserves its own section, because it is where a large share of “my new site is invisible” cases actually end up, and because the fix is nowhere near where the checks above tell you to look.

On a site builder you generally cannot edit robots.txt or the page code directly, so check three is not available to you in the form described. Google’s own robots.txt documentation says exactly this — naming Wix and Blogger — and gives the right instruction instead: your platform exposes a search settings page or some equivalent mechanism, and you should look up how to change page visibility in search engines for your specific platform.

Three things to look for, whichever builder you are on. Deliberately no menu paths here: these interfaces get rearranged regularly and a confidently wrong instruction is worse than none, so search your platform’s own help centre for the current wording.

• The switch that hides the site from search engines. Every builder has one. It is commonly on while a site is being built, and turning it off is a single click that never gets made because nobody knew it existed. This is the builder equivalent of the stray noindex, and it is the first thing to check.
• Whether the site is genuinely published, and on a paid plan rather than a trial. Builders routinely treat an unpublished draft or a trial site as private. It looks finished to you because you are signed in to the account that built it.
• Whether your own domain is properly connected. If the real site still lives at a platform subdomain and your domain merely forwards to it, then the address you keep searching for and the address Google has actually indexed are two different things — which also produces the duplicate-copy problem described in check five.

None of this is an argument against builders. They are decent products at a genuinely low price, and we say so at length in the honest comparison between builders and a built site. It is an argument for knowing which switches exist on the thing you have bought, because nobody hands you that list when you sign up.

The trap: indexed, but only for your own name

Here is the situation that generates the most unnecessary anguish. You search your business name and there you are, top result, everything correct. You search “electrician Gravesend” and you are nowhere. It feels like a half-working website. It is not. It is exactly what a new site is supposed to look like.

Your business name is a search almost nothing else in the world competes for. Winning it proves you are indexed and that Google can match your pages to a query. That is the whole of what it proves. A competitive service-and-town search is contested by firms that have been indexed for eight years, have dozens of sites referring to them, and have a Business Profile with two hundred reviews on it. Being newer is not a defect you can fix with a setting.

Google’s guidance on debugging Search traffic drops makes the general point in a related context: positions are not static or fixed in place, because the open web is constantly changing. Rankings move. Yours will move up and down for reasons you cannot see and did not cause. Judge the site quarterly, not on a Tuesday night.

What nobody can tell you

There is no guaranteed timescale for indexing. Google does not publish one, does not commit to one, and the recrawl documentation quoted above explicitly declines to promise inclusion at all. Any web company that tells you “you will be on Google in seven days” has invented that number. It might happen in two days. It might take weeks. Both are normal.

Nor can anyone promise you a position. Google’s guidance on whether you need an SEO says it in one line: no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google, and you should be wary of anyone who claims to guarantee rankings or a special relationship with Google. That sentence is worth remembering the next time a cold caller offers you page one for a fixed monthly fee. It is also worth applying to the newer version of the same pitch — see what is actually controllable in AI search, which is a shorter list than the pitch suggests.

What to do this week, in order

1. Run the site: search. Thirty seconds. It splits the problem in two.
2. Verify the domain in Search Console if it is not already, and inspect your homepage and two service pages.
3. Read your own robots.txt in a browser. Ask your web company in writing about noindex.
4. Submit a sitemap. Once. Then stop touching it.
5. Put your website address on your Business Profile, your Facebook page and every legitimate listing you already hold.
6. Search a distinctive sentence from your homepage in quotes to flush out duplicates.
7. Leave it alone for a month and look at Search Console again, not at Google.

That list is nearly free. If it is all done and the site is indexed and still quiet, the problem has moved from technical to commercial: the site is not the best answer to the question being searched, and that is a content and evidence problem rather than a plumbing one.

Where we stand on this

F12 builds sites that are technically findable from day one — crawlable, submitted, with a sitemap and no leftover blocking rules — because that part is not clever, it is just competence, and it should not be a paid extra. The prices are on the pricing section and published in full: £700 then £65 a month for a sole trader, £1,500 then £145, £3,000 then £295, all excluding VAT. What each band contains is broken down further in what a £700 website actually includes, and the wider question of what a trade site should cost is in the cost bands.

If you already have a site and cannot tell whether it is broken or just young, the Growth Diagnostic asks five questions and tells you which of the three states you are probably in — including, often, that nothing is wrong and the honest advice is to wait.

What we cannot promise is when Google will index anything, or where it will place you when it does. Nobody can. We can promise the site will not be the reason it doesn’t.

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