My Website Is Not Indexed on Google: Where to Start
You published a website. Days passed, maybe weeks. You searched for your own brand name and found nothing. If you are asking why your website is not indexed on Google, you are usually facing one of a small number of problems, and they are worth checking in a particular order: cheapest checks first, slowest explanations last. This guide is that order. It is written for the whole-site case, the one where nothing from your domain shows up at all, which is a different situation from a single stubborn page.
First, confirm the site is actually not indexed
Before diagnosing anything, establish the facts. A quick brand search proving nothing is not the same as absence from the index. New sites often are indexed but rank so low for every query that you never see them. Those are different problems with different fixes.
Two checks settle it. If you have Google Search Console, the Page indexing report tells you exactly how many of your pages Google knows about and what state each is in. If you do not have Search Console set up, search Google for your exact homepage URL in quotes. If the homepage appears, your site is indexed and your problem is visibility, not indexing. If nothing from the domain appears anywhere, carry on reading.
One distinction to hold onto throughout: being submitted to Google and being indexed by Google are separate events. Submitting asks Google to look. It does not oblige Google to keep what it finds.
New site or established site? Two different problems
The age of the domain changes the likely diagnosis.
A new domain, published in the last few weeks, is most often not indexed for the least satisfying reason: Google has not got round to it yet. Google discovers pages by following links from pages it already knows and by reading sitemaps, as described in its own overview of how Search works. A brand-new domain with no links pointing at it sits outside that discovery graph. Nothing is broken. Nobody has arrived.
An established site that used to be indexed and has vanished is a different animal. Something changed: a redesign shipped with a stray noindex, a robots.txt was overwritten, a migration moved every URL, or a manual action was applied. For a disappearance, your first stop is Search Console’s messages and the Page indexing report, because the change that caused it is usually recent and usually visible there.
The rest of this guide follows the first case, the new or never-indexed site, though every blocker below applies to both.
Why is my website not indexed on Google? Check the blockers first
Most whole-site indexing problems are self-inflicted, and the good news is that self-inflicted problems are fixable in an afternoon. Check these four before anything else.
robots.txt. Fetch yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see Disallow: / under a user-agent that covers Googlebot, crawling is blocked sitewide. This happens constantly, usually because a staging configuration went live with the site. The mechanics and the fix are covered in our guide to the robots.txt disallow trap.
Sitewide noindex. View the source of your homepage and look for a robots meta tag containing noindex. Many CMS platforms have a single checkbox (“discourage search engines” in WordPress, for example) that applies this to every page. One checkbox, whole site invisible.
DNS and hosting. Confirm the site actually loads from outside your network, over HTTPS, at the exact hostname you expect. A site that resolves for you on your own machine can still be unreachable to a crawler if DNS is misconfigured or the host blocks unknown user agents.
Canonical and redirect tangles. If every page declares a canonical pointing at another domain, or the www and non-www versions redirect in a loop, Google has no stable URL to index. Check what your homepage’s canonical tag says and where a plain HTTP request to your bare domain ends up.
If any of these four is wrong, fix it before doing anything else. Submitting a blocked site accomplishes nothing.
Then make the site discoverable
With the blockers cleared, the remaining task is getting Google to arrive. Three moves cover it.
Submit a sitemap. A sitemap is the one channel where you hand Google your full URL list directly rather than waiting for link discovery. Search Console accepts it under Sitemaps; it is the highest-leverage single action for a new domain.
Request indexing for your key pages. Search Console’s URL Inspection tool lets you ask Google to crawl a specific URL. It is rate-limited and per-URL, so use it on the homepage and a handful of pages that matter most, not the whole site.
Earn at least one real link. A directory listing, a partner mention, a profile page on a site Google already crawls. Discovery follows links; a domain with zero inbound links is relying entirely on the sitemap.
Then verify, on a schedule, rather than searching anxiously each morning. This is where a tool earns its keep: AIndexify takes your URL list, submits it through the indexing pipeline, and then checks each URL against live Google results on a fixed schedule over the following week, reporting submitted and indexed as the two separate events they are. No Search Console connection or ownership proof is required, which matters when the site is too new to have history anywhere.
When everything checks out and it is still not indexed
Sometimes the site is clean, discoverable, submitted, and still absent after weeks. At that point the honest answer is that Google has looked and has not yet decided the pages earn a place. Indexing is a judgement made on Google’s schedule, and no tool or setting overrides it. The levers left are the slow ones: more substantial pages, more links from indexed sites, and time. The full indexing guide walks through that longer game, and once some pages are in and others are not, the diagnosis becomes page-level; our list of reasons a page does not get indexed picks up there.
Start with the facts, though. Most “my site is not indexed” cases end at a robots.txt line or a forgotten checkbox, found in under an hour.
If you would rather know than wonder, submit your URLs and see where each page actually stands, checked against live Google results over the days that follow.