"My website isn't showing on Google" describes three different problems: the site is not in Google's index, or it is in the index but sits in positions nobody looks at, or it is not the website that is missing but the business profile on Maps. The fix is different in each case, and the first is the rarest. It takes three minutes to work out which one you have.
Three problems that go by the same name
People who write to us saying their site is invisible have nearly always run the same test: they searched for the company name or the service they sell, did not see themselves, and concluded that Google does not know they exist. In most cases Google knows them perfectly well.
An Ahrefs study of around 14 billion indexed pages found that 96.55% get no clicks at all from Google and another 1.94% get between one and ten a month. These pages are properly in the index: the search engine has read them, stored them, assessed them, and then put them where nobody goes. The sample is international and traffic estimates are estimates, but the order of magnitude says one thing. The invisibility almost everyone experiences is not an indexing problem.
The third case wastes the most time, because the person talks about the website and means something else. A restaurant, a dental practice or a garage that says "we don't show up on Google" is usually looking at the map, not the blue links. There the website matters little: what is missing is the business profile.
The test that tells you which of the three you have
Step one, the one Google itself recommends: search for site:yourdomain.co.uk in the search bar. If pages come up, the site is in the index and the problem is ranking. If nothing comes up, go down a level.
With a caveat that hardly anyone mentions: the site: operator returns a sample, not the full list, and the estimated number of results at the top is approximate. It answers yes or no; it does not count pages. For that there is the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, which queries the real index and tells you, for a single URL, whether it is there and when Googlebot last visited it.
Step two: search Google for the exact company name. If the site appears when you search for the brand but not when you search for what you sell, indexing is fine and the work to be done is on content and commercial keywords. This is by far the most common scenario, and the one an SEO audit is there to take apart.
What Search Console says when a page is not in the index
If the test says the site really is missing, the answer is in the Page indexing report in Search Console. Google uses fixed labels and each one means something specific. This is the table worth keeping open while you look at the report, with the exact labels Google uses in the Search Central documentation.
| Label in Search Console | What actually happened | Is it a problem? |
|---|---|---|
| Blocked by robots.txt | The site's robots.txt file forbids crawling that address | Yes, nearly always a configuration error |
| Excluded by 'noindex' tag | The page code contains an instruction asking Google not to index it | Yes, if the page was meant to be public |
| Discovered - currently not indexed | Google knows the address but has not read it yet, often because the server was responding slowly | Keep an eye on it: check server response times |
| Crawled - currently not indexed | Google read the page and decided not to keep it | Yes, and it is a judgement on the content, not a technical fault |
| Alternate page with proper canonical tag | The page points to a main version that Google has indexed instead | No, it is working as intended |
| Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user | You declared a canonical, Google preferred another | Yes, your canonicalisation signal is not getting through |
| Blocked due to unauthorized request (401) | The site asks Googlebot for a password too | Yes, typical of staging environments left protected |
| Soft 404 | The page responds normally but its content looks like an error page | Yes, often empty pages or internal search results |
| Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt | The address is in the index, but Google could not read its content | Yes, the result appears in the SERP without a description |
The two rows that cause the most confusion are the third and fourth. "Discovered" and "crawled" look like synonyms and are not: in the first case Google has not opened the page yet, in the second it has opened it and thrown it out. Resubmitting the URL for crawling only helps in the first case. In the second, the only lever is rewriting the page.
The two duplicate entries nearly always lead to two topics worth keeping separate: how the canonical tag is handled, and genuine duplicate content, meaning identical product pages or versions of the same page reachable from several addresses.
How long to wait before calling it a problem
On a newly launched site, half the warnings clear themselves. Google says in its own guide that you should allow at least a week after submitting a sitemap or an indexing request before assuming a problem, and that the whole journey from discovery to indexing "can be anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks, typically".
Getting into the index and ranking run on two different clocks. The first runs in days, the second in months: how long a project really takes to produce traffic is a question with a long answer, and we wrote it up in how long SEO takes to show results.
The most common case: the site is there, but on page nine
In 2020 we started working with Macropix, a Milan-based manufacturer of custom LED screens. The site was live, indexed, technically sound, and did not appear for any of the category keywords in its sector. For the owner, the effect was indistinguishable from not having a site at all.
The line we quote most often is not the first position for ledwall, which gets 4,400 searches a month in Italy. It is monitor pubblicitario (advertising display): from position 88 to position 2. Position 88 is page nine of Google, an address that is perfectly present in the index and does not get a click in a year. Today that site holds more than a hundred keywords in the top three positions. The method and the full numbers are in the piece on SEO for manufacturing.
When a site is indexed but invisible, there are three recurring causes and none of them is technical. The pages answer a different question from the one people type, and there the work starts from search intent. Or the site only covers its own name, like company catalogues made of "Products" pages without a single word anyone would search for. Or there are older, better-linked competitors on the same query, and the answer is to choose different queries.
A separate case: if the site used to appear and has stopped, this is not the diagnostic path. A sudden loss of visibility is handled as a traffic drop, starting from the dates and the algorithm updates.
When the problem is the profile, not the site
For a business with physical premises, "I don't show up on Google" nearly always means the panel with name, opening hours, phone number and directions does not appear. That panel does not come from the website: it comes from Google Business Profile, which is a separate, free listing that has to be claimed and verified.
A site can be flawless and the profile missing, and the other way round. The two influence each other little and are measured with different tools: map rankings depend on distance, category relevance, reviews and the consistency of business details across the web, topics that belong to local SEO rather than to an indexing diagnosis.
There is now a fourth way of not showing up
Since Google began rolling out AI Overviews in the UK in August 2024, a summary generated by Google often appears above the organic results. A site can be indexed, ranking on page one, and still be left out of that answer.
How narrow the selection is was measured in Italy by SEOZoom on a sample of more than 30 million Google Italy keywords: of around 168 million domains visible in Italian search, only 175,000 are cited in AI answers, 0.1%. It is Italian data, but there is no reason to expect the selection to be looser in the UK.
On how people behave when they read those summaries, the most solid data comes from the United States. The Pew Research Center followed 68,879 searches made by 900 US adults in March 2025 and found that, when an AI summary appears, 8% of visits produce a click on a result, against 15% when there is no summary. Inside the summary itself, people click in 1% of cases. It is a US sample and should be read as such, but it points the same way for anyone working on UK search results. What changes in practice is covered in our guide to AI Overviews.
The causes we find most often when we open up a site
In order of frequency, these are the five that keep coming up in the projects we inherit.
- The noindex left on from testing. In WordPress it is a checkbox in Settings, Reading, "Discourage search engines from indexing this site", which the developer ticks during the build and sometimes forgets to untick at launch. Shopify, Wix and Squarespace have an equivalent switch.
- A robots.txt copied from another project, with a blocking rule that on the new site excludes folders that were meant to stay public.
- A rebuilt site without redirects. The old addresses stop existing and people looking for them find a 404 error: redirects are mapped one by one, and the right type is nearly always the 301.
- A new domain with no inbound links. Google gets first to where someone sends it: an isolated site can stay in the "Discovered - currently not indexed" state for a long time.
- Service pages identical to each other, differing only by the town name. They end up in the duplicates category and Google keeps one.
It is worth remembering how widespread the starting situation is. According to the latest E-commerce and ICT activity bulletin from the ONS (2019 data), 81.4% of UK businesses with 10 to 49 employees had a website, but only 25.2% of businesses with 10 or more employees received orders through their website. For most, the site is a shop window published once and then left alone, and that is exactly the condition in which a forgotten noindex can stay in place for years without anyone noticing.
If the diagnosis points to the second scenario, the indexed but invisible site, the next steps are in the list of fixes in order of impact. If you need someone to open Search Console and look for you, we do that within our SEO projects, and you can see results from the sites we have worked on in our projects.
Frequently asked questions
Google gives a range from a day or two to a few weeks, and recommends allowing at least a week after submitting the sitemap before treating it as a problem. Being in the index does not mean ranking, though: to see traffic on competitive keywords you are thinking in months.
Search Google for site:yourdomain.co.uk: if pages come up, the site is in the index. The operator returns an approximate sample, so to check a single address use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, which queries the real index.
Because indexing works and the problem is ranking. It happens when pages are written in the company's internal language instead of the words people type, or when there are more established competitors on those queries. It is solved by working on content and keyword selection, not by technical fixes.
It means Googlebot read the page and chose not to add it to the index. It is a judgement on the content, not a technical block: resubmitting the URL for crawling does not change the outcome, the page needs rewriting. 'Discovered - currently not indexed' is different: Google knows the address but has not opened it yet.
They are two separate presences. The panel with opening hours, phone number and directions comes from Google Business Profile, a free listing you claim and verify, independent of the website. A site can be indexed and ranking while the profile does not exist or has not been verified.
Manual actions are notified: they appear in the Manual actions report in Search Console, with the reason and the pages affected. Algorithmic adjustments, on the other hand, generate no notification, and can only be recognised by matching the dates of the drop with the updates Google has announced.
One thing the industry rarely says: the question "why am I not showing up" is nearly always framed wrongly, and that has a real cost. Whoever asks it is thinking of a switch to flip back on, and ends up paying for technical fixes, plugins and sitemap submissions for a site that was indexed from day one. The Macropix case shows it: the difference between position 88 and position 2 was not made by a technical correction, it was made by a well-written page on a subject the company had something to say about. Before paying to be found, spend three minutes checking whether the problem is that Google cannot see you or that nobody searches for you with the words you have used.
