Why is my website not showing on Google? Six checks, in order

A page missing from Google is usually missing for a reason you can see from outside, and Google's own tools say which. Work through these in order and stop at the first one that explains it.

By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 29 October 20263 minute read5 sources

1. Is it really missing?

Search Google for site:yourdomain.ie. Google suggests this as the first check, with a caveat: the site: search does not necessarily return every page it has indexed. If the homepage appears, the site is on Google and the question is about particular pages; if nothing appears, carry on.

Search Console answers properly. Add the site, then put the address into the URL Inspection tool, which shows whether Google has the page, when it last crawled it, and what it saw.

2. Is the page asking to be left out?

A noindex rule keeps a page out of Google on purpose, and it is easy to leave behind from a site's building stage. Google reads it in two places: a robots meta tag in the page's head, and an X-Robots-Tag header in the server's response. Either one is enough.

The free AI crawler access check reads your homepage and reports a noindex in either place.

3. Is robots.txt turning Google away?

robots.txt can stop Googlebot reading a page at all. Google's documentation adds a catch: a page blocked in robots.txt can still appear in results, without a description, if other sites link to it, and Google never sees a noindex on a page it is not allowed to read. A page you meant to hide can show, and a page you meant to show can be blocked. How robots.txt is read goes through the rules.

4. Can Google find the page?

Google finds pages by following links and by reading sitemaps. Its guidance is that a sitemap helps it discover and prioritise pages, though it does not limit crawling to them. A page that no other page links to, and that is not in the sitemap, may simply not have been found.

Submit the sitemap in Search Console, link the page from somewhere relevant on your own site, and, for the pages that matter most, Google says you can send it the address directly.

5. Has it had time?

Google's own words are that it can take a few weeks to notice a new site or a change to an existing one, and that some sites are missed. A site launched last week and absent from Google today is not yet a fault.

6. Found, but not indexed

Search Console's Page indexing report lists pages Google knows about and has chosen not to index, with a reason. "Discovered, currently not indexed" means it found the address and has not crawled it yet. Duplicates and pages that name another address as their canonical version are left out on purpose.

Our own site is the example. When we read Search Console on 29 October 2026, 89 of the 94 addresses in our sitemap were indexed; four were "Discovered, currently not indexed" and one was unknown to Google. The fix for those is the one in step 4: more links to them from pages Google already reads.

Not on Google means not in its AI answers either

Google says a page has to be indexed and able to show a snippet to appear as a source in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The checks above are the same checks.

Sources

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Who wrote this

Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital

Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the legislation itself before it is published, and each article shows the date it was last checked.

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