Type something into Google that should obviously bring up your website, get nothing back, and the conclusion arrives immediately: the site is broken. Occasionally that is right. More often the website is sitting in Google's index behaving itself, and the search that returned nothing was never one you were going to win.
"Not showing up on Google" is three different problems wearing the same coat. One is a technical fault, usually a single setting, fixable in an afternoon. One is competition, which takes months and cannot be hurried. One is a separate listing that has nothing to do with your website at all. Paying to fix the wrong one is the normal outcome, because from the outside all three look identical.
So the first job is diagnosis, and nearly all of it is free.
Three problems, one symptom
Whatever you have, it is almost certainly one of these:
- —Not indexed. Google does not hold your pages at all, so you cannot appear for anything, including your own business name. The rare one, and usually one setting.
- —Indexed but not ranking. Google holds your pages and shows them for some searches, just not the ones you keep testing. This is the common one by a wide margin.
- —Missing from the map results. Your website is fine, but your Google Business Profile is absent, unverified, duplicated or suspended. A different listing, a different fix.
The way you are searching is probably misleading you
Before touching anything, rule out the possibility that nothing is wrong except the test. Google's results are not one fixed list that everybody sees. They vary by location, by device, by language, by what you have clicked before, and for local searches by where exactly you are standing.
That cuts both ways. You may be invisible to yourself on an oversubscribed search where you sit at position fourteen, which is in the index and effectively nowhere. Or you may look healthier than you are: logged into the browser you have used to visit your own site hundreds of times, sitting in the middle of the area you serve.
An incognito window helps a little, but it still infers your location from your connection, so it is not what a customer in the next borough sees. The only instrument reporting what other people actually saw is Google Search Console, which is free.
The check that settles it takes about two minutes
Most guides tell you to search site:yourdomain.co.uk, and it is a reasonable smell test. Read it carefully, though: it does not reliably return everything Google holds, so a short list proves little. An empty result for a site live for a while is genuinely informative.
The authoritative answer is in Search Console. Paste a page's address into the URL Inspection bar and it tells you plainly whether that page is on Google, and if not, why. Then open the Page indexing report, which groups every page by what Google decided about it. A handful of statuses cover nearly everything a small business site throws up:
- —Excluded by noindex tag, or Blocked by robots.txt: something on the site is telling Google to stay away. This is the fault worth finding, because it is quick to fix.
- —Discovered, currently not indexed: Google knows the address exists and has not fetched it yet. Often a matter of patience on a new or slow site.
- —Crawled, currently not indexed: Google fetched the page and chose not to keep it. Nothing is blocking it; this is a judgement about the page, not an error.
- —Alternate page with proper canonical tag: normal, and usually correct. The page is a duplicate pointing at the version Google did index.
- —Page with redirect, or Not found: the address you are checking is not the address of the live page.
The settings that genuinely block a website
When a site really is absent, the cause is nearly always one of a short list, and each is a few minutes' work for whoever maintains the site:
One nuance trips up people fixing this themselves. Blocking a page in robots.txt and telling Google not to index it are different instructions, and they interfere: block the crawling and Google never reads the noindex tag. To keep a page out of Google, let it be crawled and use noindex. To keep it in, use neither.
- —In WordPress, the Discourage search engines from indexing this site box under Settings, Reading, left on after a staging build
- —A noindex tag left in a shared template or theme setting after a rebuild, which quietly takes out every page using it
- —A robots.txt file carried over from a staging site, disallowing everything
- —A canonical tag pointing every page at the homepage, telling Google the rest are duplicates not worth keeping
- —A password, holding page or coming-soon plugin still active on part of the site
- —A new domain that was never submitted, with no links pointing at it from anywhere else online
- —Navigation where links only exist once a script has run, leaving pages with nothing pointing at them
If the site is new, some of this is waiting
Google publishes no timetable for indexing a new site, and there is no way to pay for it. Buying Google Ads does nothing for your organic listings, whatever a cold caller tells you. The Request indexing button in Search Console is a hint rather than an instruction, and pressing it repeatedly achieves nothing.
What does help is unglamorous: a sitemap submitted in Search Console, internal links so every page is reachable in a click or two from the homepage, a verified Google Business Profile, and a genuine link or two from elsewhere, a supplier's stockist page or a trade body. Beyond that it is a page worth indexing, which no technical work substitutes for.
The honest limit: nobody can guarantee Google will index a page, and anybody offering to is selling something. What can be guaranteed is that nothing is standing in the way, which is a different and achievable promise.
Indexed but invisible is the usual diagnosis
In most cases we look at, the site is indexed. Search the business name and there it is; search the service and it is nowhere, and that is the complaint underneath the complaint.
This is not a fault, it is a queue. The terms people test first are the two or three word ones with the most competition, where established sites have been accumulating content and links for years. Being absent from page one of those a few months after launch is expected rather than evidence of a problem.
The way through is duller than most people hope. One page per thing you want to be found for, rather than a homepage attempting all of it, answering the longer and more specific searches people type when they are closer to buying. Real detail: prices or ranges, areas served, timescales, photographs of your own work.
On timescales, be realistic. Local and long-tail terms often move within weeks to a couple of months. Competitive terms in a city like London usually need four to six months of consistent work before anything meaningful shifts, and anybody promising faster is guessing.
The map results are a separate competition
If your worry is the block of three businesses with a map above the normal results, your website is not the lever. That is drawn from Google Business Profiles, and a business can rank respectably in the organic results while being entirely absent from the map.
The usual causes are an unverified or suspended profile, duplicate listings competing with each other, categories that do not match what you do, or plain proximity, which is the uncomfortable one. For many searches Google favours businesses near the searcher, and no amount of work moves your premises. If you serve an area rather than trade from a shopfront, the profile needs setting up as a service-area business, which is a specific option rather than hiding your address and hoping.
Showing up now includes answers nobody clicks
There is a fourth version of this question now: being visible without being clicked. Where a search is answered on the page by an AI summary, or asked of an assistant instead of a search engine, visibility means being one of the sources cited rather than holding a position in a list. The groundwork overlaps with everything above, and the trap specific to it is robots.txt again, because some sites and some hosting platforms by default block the crawlers those systems use. That removes you from the route entirely while leaving your Google listings untouched, so it is worth knowing which of those decisions you made deliberately.
Where we come in
Nine times in ten this ends somewhere ordinary: a setting carried over from a staging site, a canonical tag doing something nobody intended, a profile never verified, or a healthy website being measured against searches it was never built to win.
If your site is not appearing and you want to know which of those it is, send us the domain. We will look at what Google is actually holding, tell you what is blocking it and what is simply going to take time, and if the answer is an afternoon's work rather than a project, we will say so. Anything larger is a fixed quote after a short call, there are no long contracts, and you own the site from day one.