If your site isn't showing up on Google, it's almost always one of nine things. Here's how to check each one — in the order that actually matters — and fix it.
Somewhere between "I published this page" and "someone finds it on Google" there's a chain of things that all have to go right: Google has to know the page exists, be allowed to crawl it, decide it's worth indexing, and then decide it's worth ranking. Most "my site isn't showing up" problems break at one specific link in that chain — and once you know which one, the fix is usually mechanical.
This is a checklist, in the order you should actually check things. Don't skip to #7 because it sounds interesting — the earlier causes are both more common and faster to rule out.
Open a new tab and search:
site:yoursite.comGoogle doesn't index new domains instantly — it has to discover you first, crawl you, and build enough trust signals to bother indexing you seriously. For a brand-new domain with no backlinks, "a few weeks before anything shows up" is normal, not a bug. If your domain is under ~2 months old and everything below checks out, the honest answer is: keep publishing, keep building links, and give it time.
This is the single most common self-inflicted cause — usually left over from a staging environment. Right-click the page → View Page Source → search for robots:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />If you see noindex anywhere in that tag, Google is being explicitly told not to index the page — no amount of links or content quality will overcome it. Remove the tag (or fix whatever CMS setting is generating it) and the page becomes eligible again.
A noindex tag can't even be read if Googlebot isn't allowed to fetch the page in the first place. Check yoursite.com/robots.txt for a line like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /That blocks your entire site. A narrower Disallow: /blog/ blocks just that section. See our full robots.txt guide for what should and shouldn't be blocked.
If there's no sitemap and nothing else on your site (or the web) links to the page, Google has no path to discover it. This is especially common right after a launch or a big content push. Submit a sitemap — see how to generate one — and make sure the page is linked from at least one other page on your site, ideally your nav or a relevant blog post.
Everything above is guesswork without GSC. It tells you, directly, whether a URL is indexed, why it isn't, and when it was last crawled — instead of you inferring it from a site: search. If you haven't set it up, do that before going further down this list: Google Search Console setup guide.
Check the page source for:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/some-other-url" />If the canonical URL doesn't match the page you're on, you're telling Google "the real version of this content lives elsewhere" — and Google will index that URL instead, not this one. This is often a CMS default (pointing every page's canonical at the homepage) rather than something anyone set intentionally.
In GSC's Coverage report, this shows as "Crawled — currently not indexed." Google visited the page and chose not to add it to the index — usually because the content is thin, near-duplicate of another page, or doesn't clear the (unpublished, relative) quality bar for that topic. The fix is content quality, not a technical setting: make the page substantively different and more useful than what's already ranking.
This is distinct from "Discovered — currently not indexed," which means Google knows the page exists but hasn't crawled it yet — a different problem with a different fix, covered in this article.
A page with zero internal links (buried three folders deep, never linked from nav, footer, or another post) signals low priority to Google, even if it's in your sitemap. Being listed in a sitemap gets a page discovered faster; being linked from other indexed pages is what actually tells Google the page matters. Audit your important pages: can you reach each one by clicking links from your homepage in three clicks or fewer?
Rare, but worth ruling out if nothing else explains it. In GSC, go to Security & Manual Actions → Manual actions. If there's an entry, Google has flagged something specific (usually spam, cloaking, or a hacked-site issue) — read the description, it tells you exactly what to fix and how to request review after.
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Everything above maps directly onto what a technical SEO check should cover: title tag, meta description, schema markup, canonical tag, Open Graph tags, image alt text, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, AI crawler access, and llms.txt. Running through all ten by hand — viewing source, checking robots.txt, checking your sitemap — takes a while. Peak Visibility's free checker runs all ten against your live URL in about 30 seconds and tells you exactly which ones are broken.
For an established site with decent authority, often within days once it's linked and in the sitemap. For a brand-new domain, it can take several weeks — Google needs to build enough trust in the domain before it prioritizes crawling new pages quickly.
Yes, for individual URLs — use "Request Indexing" in the URL Inspection tool after you've fixed the underlying issue. It doesn't fix a noindex tag or a robots.txt block; it just tells Google to recrawl sooner once the actual problem is resolved.
Check for a recently added noindex tag or robots.txt change first (a redeploy or CMS update is the usual culprit), then check GSC's Manual Actions page, then check whether the page's content changed significantly enough to look different from what Google originally indexed.
No — repeated indexing requests for the same unresolved issue don't help and can look like spam behavior to Google. Fix the actual cause first, then request indexing once.
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