My website is not in Google

“We are not on Google” describes two completely different problems, and the response to one is useless for the other.

Never indexed. The search engine does not hold the page at all. Almost always a specific, checkable, build-side fault.

Indexed but not visible. The page is held and does not appear for the phrases you are searching. That is competition, and it is not a fault.

The distinction takes five minutes to establish and it decides everything that follows — including whether an ongoing service is the right purchase or an irrelevant one.

The five-minute test for whether your website is showing in Google

1. Search a distinctive sentence from your home page, in quotation marks. Pick a full sentence that would not appear on anyone else’s site. If your page comes back, you are indexed.

2. Search your business name in quotation marks. If your site does not appear for its own name, something is wrong, because there is essentially no competition for it.

3. Search site: followed by your domain, with no space. This asks the search engine what it holds for your domain. A short list where you expected many pages, or nothing at all, is the finding.

Result	Diagnosis	Where to go
Sentence found	Indexed. This is a competition question	Not a fault
Business name found, other pages not	Partially indexed	Check individual pages
Nothing at all	Not indexed	Continue below
Old pages found, new ones not	Rebuild not picked up	Continue below

If nothing is indexed by Google

Four causes, in the order they turn out to be the answer.

A staging instruction carried into production. The site was built on a hidden copy, and the instruction that hid it came across at launch. Invisible from the front end, produces no error, and is the most common cause in the first weeks after a launch. It is on the launch switch.

Crawlers blocked at the site level. A single line in robots.txt disallowing everything, which is the normal contents of that file during development — or, on a specific page rather than site-wide, a noindex tag left over from a staging build. Check robots.txt by loading your domain followed by /robots.txt in a browser. See the two crawler instructions.

Canonical declarations pointing elsewhere. Every page declaring another page — often the home page, or the staging domain — as the real one. This is the mechanism meant to resolve genuine duplicate content, misapplied so the site reads as a single page, or as a copy of somewhere else. See one page at several addresses.

Genuinely new and not yet discovered. A brand new domain with no links to it takes time. If it has been under a fortnight and nothing else above applies, this may simply be waiting — but confirm the first three before deciding it is.

If pages used to be indexed and are not now

Then something changed, and the change is the diagnosis. In order of likelihood:

A rebuild without redirects. The old addresses returned errors, the new ones are unknown, and the site effectively vanished and reappeared as a stranger. This is the single most damaging launch failure and it is on the redirect map.

A domain or address change. Same problem, larger.

A platform migration. Address patterns almost always change, so this is the previous two in different clothing.

A compromise. A site serving injected content can be flagged, and the visible symptom is a drop rather than an error. See a hacked website.

An outage nobody noticed. A site that was unreachable for a sustained period during crawling. That one is on a website that will not load.

Search Console is the instrument that answers all of this properly

Google Search Console reports what the search engine actually did with each address: whether it was crawled, whether it was indexed, and if not, the stated reason. It converts this entire page from inference into a fact.

It is free, and the reason most businesses cannot use it during an incident is that the account was created on a supplier’s login and cannot be reached. Setting it up correctly, and who should hold it, is on Search Console for a new site.

If you are indexed by Google and simply not visible

Then nothing is broken, and this is the point at which the honest answer is uncomfortable: appearing for a commercially valuable phrase is a competition against every other page that could answer it, on a domain that may have no history yet.

That is an ongoing programme, not a repair. It has a monthly cost, no completion date, and no guaranteed outcome — and anyone promising a specific position is promising something they do not control. The boundary between what a build owes and what a programme is, is on the boundary between a build and SEO.

What not to buy while you are in this state

Do not buy submission services. There is no paid queue.

Do not buy links. It is the one category of intervention that can make the situation actively worse.

Do not rebuild the site again. If the cause is one of the four faults above, rebuilding repeats it. Find the cause first.

What to do next to get your website showing in Google

Do the three searches at the top of this page now. They cost nothing and they tell you which of two entirely different problems you have. If it is the build-side one, the fix is usually a single setting and belongs to whoever built the site — where that responsibility sits is on website design services.