Why Your Website Isn't Showing Up on Google, and How to Check in Ten Minutes

"My website isn't showing up on Google" is the sentence we hear most often on a first call, and it describes at least four different problems. Some of them are fixed in an afternoon. One of them is fixed by time and nothing else. Telling them apart takes about ten minutes and no tools you'd have to pay for, so that's where this starts.

We'll use our own site as the worked example, because we opened Google Search Console on it last week and the numbers were not flattering. Seventy-seven pages built. Twenty-two indexed. That's a real reading from a site we built carefully, and it's a better teacher than a made-up one.

First, which Google?

When an owner says the business isn't on Google, they usually mean one of three things, and each has its own fix.

The map. Somebody searches "plumber near me" or "physio Oakville" and the three businesses in the box with the pins aren't you. That's the Google Business Profile, and it has almost nothing to do with your website. If this is your problem, the fixes are on the listing itself, and we've written them up in the Business Profile mistakes we see most.

Your own name. Somebody types your business name and your site isn't the first result, or isn't there at all. That's an indexing problem nine times out of ten, and it's the one this article is mostly about.

The category. Somebody searches "web design Mississauga" or "family lawyer Brampton" and you're on page four. That's a ranking problem. Your site is in the index and Google has decided other pages answer the question better. Different problem, different timescale, covered at the end.

Work out which of the three you have before you touch anything. Most of the wasted money in this industry is spent fixing the wrong one.

The ten-minute check

Three searches and one free tool.

1. Search your exact business name in Google. If your site appears, you're indexed, and any problem you have is a ranking problem. If a directory listing or a Facebook page appears and your site doesn't, keep going.
2. Search site:yourdomain.com (with your actual domain, no spaces). Google returns every page of yours it has in its index. Count them. Compare that to the number of pages you know you have. Our count came back at a fraction of the site, which is what sent us to step four.
3. Search site:yourdomain.com plus a phrase from a specific page. If the page is indexed it appears. If it isn't, you've found a page Google doesn't have.
4. Open Google Search Console. It's free, it takes fifteen minutes to verify ownership, and it's the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site. Go to Indexing, then Pages. The report splits every URL it knows about into indexed and not indexed, and the not-indexed side is grouped by reason. Those reasons are the whole diagnosis.

If you've never opened Search Console for your site, stop reading and do that first. Everything below assumes you can see that report.

The four gates

A page has to pass four gates before anyone can find it in a search, and it can fall at any of them. Search Console's reasons map onto the gates almost exactly.

Gate one: discovered. Google knows the URL exists. It learns URLs from links on pages it has already read, from your sitemap, and from you telling it directly. A page nothing links to, on a domain nothing links to, can sit unfound for months.

Gate two: crawled. Google has actually fetched the page and read it. Discovery and crawling are separate steps, and this is the gate most new sites are stuck at. Search Console calls it "Discovered, currently not indexed", and the crawl date next to it reads "N/A".

Gate three: indexed. Google read the page and decided to keep it. It doesn't keep everything. Pages it judges thin, duplicate, or blocked by your own settings are read and then dropped, and the report says "Crawled, currently not indexed" or names the specific block.

Gate four: ranked. The page is in the index and now competes with every other indexed page for a given search. This gate isn't a yes or no. It's a position, and it moves.

Here's what our own report said on 12 September, so you can see how the gates read in practice.

Forty-eight pages that Google knew about and had never fetched. Zero that it had fetched and rejected. That's a crawl problem, not a quality problem, and the two are fixed differently.

Stuck at gate one: Google hasn't found the page

The usual causes, in order of how often we see them.

The page isn't linked from anywhere on your own site. It's reachable from a menu that only renders on click, or from a search box, or it was published and never added to any list. Google follows links; it doesn't guess URLs.

There's no sitemap, or the sitemap is stale, or it was never submitted in Search Console. A sitemap is a plain list of your URLs at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Most platforms generate one. Check yours exists and lists the pages you expect.

The domain is new and nothing on the wider web links to it. Google finds new sites by following links from sites it already knows. A domain with zero inbound links is discovered slowly, if at all. This was, and still is, our own biggest constraint: the Links report showed zero external links to our domain.

The fix is mechanical. Make sure every page is linked in normal text from at least one other page. Submit the sitemap. Then get one or two real links from outside: your own client sites, your industry association, a local business directory that actually gets visited.

Stuck at gate two: found but never crawled

This is where our forty-eight pages were, and the reason is worth understanding because it's invisible from the outside.

Google gives every site a crawl budget: roughly, how many fetches it's willing to spend on you per day. For an established site that's thousands. For a new one it's small. Ours was about nineteen requests a day. What decides whether those nineteen fetches do any good is what they land on.

Search Console's crawl stats told us. More than half of Google's requests to our site were for JavaScript files, not pages. Only about one in eight was for HTML. And 92 percent of the requests were re-fetches of things it had seen before, against 8 percent discovering anything new.

The cause was us. Modern sites bundle their code into files whose names change on every deploy, and we'd pushed about fifteen deploys in two weeks. Every deploy renamed every bundle, Google saw a site full of new files, and spent its nineteen daily fetches re-downloading code instead of reading the forty-eight pages it hadn't got to. The site was starving itself.

Three things fix gate two. Deploy less often, so the code stops changing under Google's feet: once or twice a week is plenty for a business site. Link the important pages from pages Google already visits, because a fetch of your home page that finds a link to a service page is a discovery Google didn't have to spend a separate request on. And request indexing by hand for the pages you need in first, service and pricing pages before blog posts.

Stuck at gate three: read and rejected

If your report shows "Crawled, currently not indexed", Google fetched the page and chose not to keep it. The reasons are more varied here.

Thin or duplicate content. Ten location pages that are the same paragraph with the city name swapped. A tag page that lists two posts. A print version of an existing page. Google keeps one and drops the rest, and it's not always the one you'd pick.

Your own settings. A noindex tag left over from the build. A canonical tag pointing at a different URL, sometimes the staging site. A robots rule blocking the folder. Search Console names these directly: "Excluded by noindex tag", "Alternate page with proper canonical tag", "Blocked by robots.txt". Each one is a single line of code to fix, and each one is a line somebody added on purpose at some point.

Content that only exists after JavaScript runs. Google does run JavaScript, eventually, in a second pass that can lag the first by days or weeks. A page that's empty until a script fills it in can be crawled, judged empty, and dropped before that second pass happens. AI crawlers mostly never run it at all, which is a separate problem we wrote up earlier.

The fix depends entirely on which reason the report gives, which is why the report matters more than any general advice. Read the reason, fix that thing, request indexing once.

Stuck at gate four: indexed and invisible anyway

Your site is in the index. You rank for your own name. You don't rank for anything else. This is the most common situation for a small business site that's more than a year old, and it's the one where "SEO" is actually the answer, so it's also where the most is sold.

Three honest things about it.

Authority takes time and links, and there's no shortcut anyone can sell you. A five-year-old competitor with sixty referring domains outranks a six-month-old site with none, and will keep doing so until that changes. What you control is the rate: every real link and every review moves it.

Intent matters more than keywords. A page that says "plumbing services" in the heading and then talks about the company's history for six paragraphs loses to a page that answers "how much does a Mississauga plumber charge to fix a leaking tap" in the first hundred words. Google ranks the page that answers the question, and most business sites never ask what the question was.

Geography is real. If you're in Mississauga and want to rank in Toronto, the map pack is out of reach and the organic results are winnable but slow. We've written that one up in full, because it's the second most common first-call sentence after this one.

There's also a version of gate four that isn't a ranking problem at all. The pages are indexed, the visits are real, and the phone still doesn't ring. That one is a leak rather than a gate, and it gets fixed somewhere else entirely.

What isn't the problem

A few things owners are told to fix that won't move any of the four gates.

Meta keywords. Google stopped reading them in 2009. Submitting your site to five hundred directories: the links are worthless and the listings are inconsistent, which hurts the Business Profile side. A redesign, on its own: a new look on a site with the same indexing problems has the same indexing problems, and a redesign done carelessly loses rankings you had. Posting more blog articles when the ones you have aren't indexed: that's forty-eight pages becoming sixty pages, all at gate two.

What to do this week, in order

1. Verify Search Console and read Indexing, then Pages. Write down the counts.
2. Search site:yourdomain.com and compare the count to reality.
3. Check the sitemap exists and is submitted.
4. For every page that matters commercially, make sure a normal text link to it exists from your home page or a page linked from your home page.
5. Request indexing for the ten most important not-indexed pages. Once each.
6. Stop deploying daily if you are. Batch changes.
7. Get one real external link. A client's site, a supplier's, an association you belong to.
8. Read the report again in two weeks. The split should be moving. If it isn't, the problem is gate one and the answer is off your site, not on it.

When to bring someone in

Gates one to three are checklists. If you have an hour and Search Console open, you can do most of it, and this article is meant to be enough. Gate four is a programme rather than a fix, and so is anything where the report says one thing and the site appears to say another.

That's the work we do under AI SEO and analysis, and the first thing we do on any engagement is exactly the reading above, with the report open and your numbers in it. If you'd rather have someone do the reading with you, book a call and open Search Console before it starts. Thirty minutes is usually enough to know which gate you're at.