Why isn't my website showing on Google?

"Not showing on Google" is four different problems wearing the same coat, and they have almost nothing in common. One is a setting. One is time. One is competition. One is not about your website at all. Fixing the wrong one is how people spend money for months and see nothing change.

So work through the four stages below in order. Each one is a check you can run yourself, and each one either clears you or stops you. Stop at the first thing that is wrong.

How do I check if my website is on Google at all?

Type site: followed by your web address into Google, with no space, and read the result — this is Google's own recommended test. Its SEO starter guide says that if you see results pointing to your site, you're in the index.

So site:yourdomain.co.uk returning a list of pages means you are indexed, and your problem is somewhere in stages three or four. Nothing coming back at all means you are not in Google, and the cause is either stage two or simple newness.

Two honest caveats. The number of results is an estimate, not a count. And being in the index is not the same as ranking — Google's Search Console help puts it plainly: just because a page is indexed doesn't guarantee that it will show up in your search results.

The more precise version of the same check is the URL Inspection tool inside Google Search Console, which is free and takes about ten minutes to set up. Paste in one page address and it tells you either URL is on Google or URL is not on Google, and if it is the latter, why. Google notes that "URL is on Google" still doesn't guarantee that your page is appearing in Search results — it means eligible, not present.

How long does Google take to index a new website?

Google publishes two figures and no more: its Search Console help says it can take a week or so for Google to start crawling and indexing a new page or site, and its recrawl documentation says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

That is the whole of Google's public position. Every confident "3 to 14 days" you read elsewhere is somebody's sample dressed up as a rule. Most people panic in week one, which is far too early, and then stop worrying in month three, which is far too late.

Google is also unusually direct about the fact that none of this is promised. Its How Search works page says Google doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, and again that indexing isn't guaranteed; not every page is stored. Its recrawl page adds that requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all, because its systems prioritise the fast inclusion of high quality, useful content.

What you can legitimately do to hurry the discovery along:

• Set up Search Console and request indexing of your homepage first. Google's advice is explicit: for a new website, the best first step is to request indexing of your homepage, which should start Google crawling your website.
• Submit a sitemap. Google calls it an important way for Google to discover URLs on your site and says it is very helpful if you just launched.
• Make sure every page is actually linked from somewhere. Google needs a way to find a page in order to crawl it — it must be linked from a known page, or from a sitemap.
• Do not resubmit the same URL over and over. Google says there's a quota for submitting individual URLs and requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL won't get it crawled any faster.
• Tell Bing separately. It is a different index with its own free tools, and a Bing Webmaster Tools account plus IndexNow is a twenty-minute job that also feeds several AI assistants.

A reasonable rule: if a month has passed, the homepage is still not in site: results, and Search Console gives no blocking reason, stop waiting and start looking for stage two.

Is my website accidentally blocking Google?

This is the cause worth ruling out before any other, because it is self-inflicted, free to fix, and invisible unless you go looking. Two checks cover most of it, and both work on any platform.

Check one. Open your page, right-click, choose View Page Source, and press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) for the word noindex. If it appears in a robots meta tag, that page is instructing Google to stay out. Google's description of the effect is total: it will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.

Check two. Visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and look for Disallow: /, which blocks the whole site from being crawled.

There is a trap here that catches professionals, so it is worth knowing. If a page is blocked in robots.txt and has a noindex tag, the noindex never takes effect, because Google never gets to read it. Google's wording: if the page is blocked by a robots.txt file or the crawler can't access the page, the crawler will never see the noindex rule, and the page can still appear in search results. Robots.txt is also not a way to hide a page — Google says it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google. Blocking with robots.txt and expecting removal is one of the most common own goals in this whole area.

The other four self-inflicted causes

• A staging site still live. If the version your developer built at staging.yourdomain.co.uk or a builder subdomain is still reachable, you can end up with two copies of your site and Google choosing the wrong one. Run site: on the staging address too. The fix is to password-protect or remove it, not to noindex it and leave it up.
• A canonical tag pointing at the wrong page. A canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one. Copied across during a rebuild, it can quietly point every page at the homepage, or at the old domain. In Search Console's URL Inspection, the field to read is Google-selected canonical; Google notes you can only see it in the indexed data, not in a live test. Search your page source for rel="canonical" and confirm each page points at itself.
• A password or coming-soon screen. Trial plans, unpaid plans, unpublished drafts and shop password pages all hide a site by design. If a page needs a login, Google cannot see it.
• Nothing in the source to read. If your site is built entirely in JavaScript, view-source may show almost no words at all. Google does render JavaScript, but in a second pass: it queues all pages with a 200 status code for rendering, and says the page may stay on this queue for a few seconds, but it can take longer than that. If the content isn't visible in the rendered HTML, Google won't be able to index it. Use URL Inspection's rendered HTML view to see what Google actually ended up with, and if the answer is an empty shell, ask whoever built the site about server-side rendering — Google still recommends it because not all bots can run JavaScript.

Why isn't my Wix, Squarespace, Shopify or GoDaddy site showing up?

Every builder has the same switch in a different drawer, and every one of them also hides sites that are unpublished, on a trial, unpaid or password-protected. The names of menus move around, so rather than trust a screenshot from last year, use the two universal checks above — they tell you the truth about your live site regardless of platform.

Where to look once you know something is wrong: Wix keeps a site-level "let search engines index your site" switch in its SEO settings plus a per-page toggle, and a site must be published, not just saved. Squarespace hides trial and unpaid sites from search and has a per-page "hide from search results" option. Shopify's usual culprit is the shop-wide password under Online Store preferences. GoDaddy has a site-wide no-index setting. Untick it, republish, and expect Google to take days to weeks to come back round.

What does "Discovered — currently not indexed" mean?

It means Google knows your page exists but has not fetched it yet, and the reason is usually your server rather than your content. Google's own definition: the page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl.

That is why the last crawl date is blank on the report. It is a queue, not a verdict. Practically, that means: check the page loads quickly for you, check your hosting is not straining, and check the page is linked from somewhere Google visits often rather than stranded with no links to it. Then leave it. Repeatedly requesting indexing will not move it up the queue.

What does "Crawled — currently not indexed" mean?

It means Google fetched the page, read it, and decided not to store it. Google's description is short and worth reading twice: the page was crawled by Google but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.

Note what Google does not say. It does not say the page is penalised, and it explicitly says resubmitting is pointless. This is a judgement about the page, and in our experience of small business sites it is almost always one of two things: the page is thin, or it is a near-copy of another page on the same site. If five service pages are the same three paragraphs with the trade swapped, expect Google to keep one.

The fix is not padding to hit a word count. It is writing the page as though you were explaining that one job to one customer — what it involves, what it costs, what goes wrong, how long it takes. Our guide on writing a service page that gets found covers what that looks like in practice.

I'm indexed but not ranking — how far down am I?

Open Search Console, go to Performance, and read the average position column for the searches you care about — that is the only number that answers this honestly. Roughly, a position of 11 to 20 means page two, 21 to 30 page three, and anything past that means nobody is seeing you.

This is the point where most people are, and it is a competition problem rather than a fault. The scale of it is worth absorbing: Ahrefs, studying around 14 billion pages in its Content Explorer index, found 96.55% of all pages get zero traffic from Google and a further 1.94% get between one and ten visits a month. In a separate 2025 study of one million newly published URLs, it found only 1.74% reached the top ten within a year, that 72.9% of pages currently in the top ten are more than three years old, and that the average number one page is five years old. Ahrefs is a commercial tool and these are its estimates, not Google's, but they are published with their method attached, which is more than most numbers in this field can claim.

What that means for you: nothing is broken. You are new, or small, in a queue of older pages. And the way out of that queue for a local business is almost never to compete head-on for the biggest phrase — it is to be the obvious answer for narrower ones, which is stage four.

Is it my website that's missing, or my Google Business Profile?

These are two entirely separate systems and it is the single most common mix-up we see. The blue links come from your website. The map — the block of businesses with a map above the results, and everything in Google Maps — comes from your Google Business Profile, a free listing that is nothing to do with your site.

So you can rank perfectly well and be invisible on the map, or dominate the map with a website almost nobody reaches. When someone says "I'm not showing up on Google," ask them which one they mean, because the fixes share nothing.

Google's guidelines say a profile is for a business that either has a physical location that customers can visit, or travels to customers where they are. The ones worth checking on yours:

• Is it claimed and verified, or is someone else's auto-generated listing sitting where yours should be?
• Is the primary category right? Google's rule is to choose the fewest number of categories that it takes to describe your overall core business.
• Is the address or service area accurate and precise, in Google's words?
• Is there exactly one profile? Google says there should only be one profile per business, as duplicates cause problems with how your information displays on Maps and Search.
• Do the name, address and phone number match your website exactly, character for character?

Note the constraint most people miss: Google's guidelines also forbid prices and promotions in the business description, with "best butties in town for £5" given as an example of what is not allowed. The profile is for facts, not offers.

It only shows for my business name — why?

Because your pages are written in your words rather than your customers', and this is the real answer far more often than anything technical. Search your business name and you appear. Search what you do plus your town and you vanish. That gap is the whole diagnosis: Google can find you, it just cannot connect you to the phrase somebody typed.

A site headed "Bright Spark Solutions" with one page called Services has given Google nothing to match against "emergency electrician Leeds". Nobody searches for a slogan. They search for a job and a place.

Read your own page titles out loud and ask whether each one contains the service and the area. If not, that is a free afternoon's work with more effect than anything else on this page. Three things, roughly in order of payoff:

• One page per service, not one page listing all of them — see writing about your services so customers can find you.
• Titles that say the thing and the place, covered in how to write a good page title and meta description.
• Proper location pages if you work across several towns, rather than a list of place names at the bottom of the homepage.

Have I been penalised, or was that phone call real?

A genuine penalty is rare for an ordinary local business, and you can confirm it in thirty seconds rather than worrying about it: Search Console, Security & Manual Actions, Manual actions. If it says "No issues detected", you have not been penalised, and the cause is one of the ordinary things above.

On the phone calls: Google states on its own documentation that it does not accept payment for crawling, indexing or ranking, and that it cannot guarantee content will be crawled, indexed or served. Nobody can sell you a guaranteed position, because Google does not have one to sell. A caller promising the top spot, saying your listing is about to expire, or pressing you to sign up on the call is either a hard sell or a scam. Hang up and run the checks above instead.

What should I actually do first?

In this order, and stop when something is wrong, because everything below it is wasted effort until the thing above is fixed.

Steps one to six cost nothing but attention. If what is really worrying you is that the phone has gone quiet rather than that you are invisible, the causes sit further down the funnel — why your website isn't getting enquiries picks up where this guide stops, and how to tell if your website is actually working covers the measurement side.

Common questions

How long does it take for Google to index a new website?

Google's Search Console documentation says it can take a week or so for Google to start crawling and indexing a new page or site, and its recrawl guidance says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Those are the only two figures Google publishes. Anything more precise that you read online is somebody's sample, not Google's position. If nothing has appeared after a month and Search Console shows no blocking reason, treat it as a problem rather than as waiting.

What does Discovered — currently not indexed mean?

It means Google knows the page exists but has not fetched it yet. Google's own description is that it wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site, so the crawl was rescheduled, which is why the last crawl date is blank. It is a queue, not a rejection. Check that the page loads quickly for you, that your host is not timing out, and that the page is linked from somewhere Google already visits, then leave it alone.

How do I fix Crawled — currently not indexed?

Google's wording is that the page was crawled but not indexed, it may or may not be indexed in the future, and there is no need to resubmit it. So resubmitting is the one thing Google tells you not to bother with. Google has looked at the page and not judged it worth storing, usually because it is thin, or near-identical to another page on the site. Rewrite it so it says something the other pages do not.

Why is my website not showing up on Google after a redesign?

Nearly always because something from the build was left switched on. The three usual culprits are a noindex tag carried over from the staging version, a site-wide password or coming-soon screen, and page addresses that changed without redirects, so the pages Google had are now dead and the new ones are unknown to it. View the page source and search for noindex first, then check that the new addresses are linked and in your sitemap.

Why is my business not showing up on Google Maps?

Because Maps does not run on your website. It runs on your Google Business Profile, which is a separate free listing, so a site that ranks perfectly well can be absent from the map. Google's guidelines require a profile to represent a business with either a physical location customers can visit or one that travels to customers, with an accurate address or service area and the fewest categories that describe the business. If the profile is unclaimed, unverified or miscategorised, the map will not show you.

My website shows on Google on my phone but not for customers — why?

Google personalises results, and you are the worst possible tester of your own site. Google says results are customised for each user's search history, location and many other variables, so even an indexed page will not show in every search or at the same position. Test in a private window, ideally on mobile data rather than the office wifi, and use Search Console's average position figure instead of your own eyes.

Why isn't my Wix or Squarespace site showing up on Google?

Usually one switch. Every builder has a setting that hides a site from search engines, and most also hide sites that are on a trial, unpaid, unpublished or behind a password. Rather than hunt through menus, prove it from outside: open your page, view the source, search for the word noindex, then open your domain followed by /robots.txt and look for Disallow: /. Those two checks work on any platform and cannot be out of date.

Can Google refuse to index my site?

Yes, and it says so plainly. Google's how Search works documentation states that indexing isn't guaranteed and that it does not guarantee it will crawl, index or serve your page. Its recrawl page adds that requesting a crawl does not guarantee inclusion instantly or even at all, because its systems prioritise fast inclusion of high quality, useful content. Nothing you buy changes that, which is why anyone selling guaranteed indexing is selling nothing.

Sources, all checked 15 September 2026. Google Search Central, In-depth guide to how Google Search works (page last updated 18 December 2025) for "indexing isn't guaranteed", "Google doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page" and that Google does not accept payment for crawling, indexing or ranking. Google Search Central, Ask Google to recrawl your URLs (last updated 10 December 2025) for "crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks", the no-guarantee-of-inclusion wording and the URL submission quota. Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide (last updated 10 December 2025) for the site: operator test. Google Search Console Help, Page Indexing report, for "it can take a week or so for Google to start crawling and indexing a new page or site", the definitions of "Crawled - currently not indexed" and "Discovered - currently not indexed", the homepage-first advice and the note that an indexed page is not guaranteed to appear. Google Search Console Help, URL Inspection tool, for "URL is on Google" not guaranteeing appearance and for the Google-selected canonical field. Google Search Central, Block Search indexing with noindex, for the effect of the tag and the robots.txt conflict. Google Search Central, Introduction to robots.txt (last updated 10 December 2025) for robots.txt not being a mechanism for keeping a page out of Google. Google Search Central, JavaScript SEO basics (last updated 4 March 2026) for the rendering queue and "if the content isn't visible in the rendered HTML, Google won't be able to index it". Google Business Profile Help, Guidelines for representing your business on Google, for eligibility, categories, one-profile-per-business and the ban on prices in descriptions. Ahrefs, 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google (published 1 December 2023, ~14 billion pages) for the 96.55% and 1.94% figures. Ahrefs, How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? (published 15 May 2025) for 1.74% of new pages reaching the top ten within a year, 72.9% of top-ten pages being over three years old and the average number one page being five years old; these are Ahrefs estimates, not Google data. Could not be sourced: any published figure for how often the map pack appears on UK trades searches, or its share of local clicks — both were in the previous version of this guide and have been removed. Platform menu names for Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and GoDaddy were not re-confirmed against vendor documentation on this date; the view-source and robots.txt checks are given instead because they are platform-independent.