My website is not showing up on Google: 7 causes and how to check each one

First: is it missing, or is it not indexed?

These are not the same question and the answers live in different places. The quick check is the site: operator, which Google documents as an approximation, not an inventory.

Search for site:your-site.com/the-page. If the page comes back, it is indexed and your problem is ranking. If nothing comes back, it is not indexed and nothing you write on that page will help until that changes.

1. Google does not know the page exists

A URL that nothing links to and that is in no sitemap is, for practical purposes, invisible. Google finds pages by following links and by reading sitemaps; if neither path reaches your page, it was never a candidate.

Fix: link to it from a page that is already indexed, and make sure it is in your sitemap. Then use URL Inspection to request indexing, remembering that requesting is not the same as getting.

2. Discovered, but not crawled yet

In the Page Indexing report this shows up as «Discovered - currently not indexed». Google knows the URL and has not fetched it, usually because it is deciding how much of your site is worth its time.

On a new site this is normal and it resolves itself. On an old site it means Google is rationing, and the answer is fewer and better pages, plus internal links from the pages it already values.

3. Crawled, and Google chose not to index it

«Crawled - currently not indexed» is the hardest one, because nothing is broken. Google fetched the page, read it and decided it was not worth keeping.

In my experience this means one of three things: the page says what another page of yours already says, it says what a hundred other sites already say, or it is a template with almost no content of its own. None of those is fixed by a technical change.

4. It is blocked in robots.txt

Open your-site.com/robots.txt in a browser and read it. Google's robots.txt documentation is clear that the file controls crawling, not indexing: a blocked page can still appear in results if other sites link to it, but with no description, because Google cannot read it.

And if you blocked a whole section by mistake, Google knows those URLs exist and cannot understand what they say. That is the worst of both states.

5. It carries a noindex tag

A meta robots noindex tag, or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header with the same value, tells Google not to index the page. It is the clearest way to keep something out of Search, and the easiest one to leave behind by accident.

curl -sI https://your-site.com/the-page | grep -i x-robots-tag
curl -s https://your-site.com/the-page | grep -i "robots"
→ nothing back from both means no noindex, header or tag

This is the single most common cause on sites that were recently migrated or recently taken out of a staging environment. The tag protected the draft and nobody removed it.

6. Google receives an empty page

If your site is built with React, Vue, or an AI builder, the first HTML the crawler receives may contain a title and an empty container. Google renders JavaScript in a second pass with limited resources, and recommends not depending on that pass for important content.

Another symptom of these apps: a URL that does not exist answers 200 with the home page, and Google treats it as a soft 404 or as a duplicate. The fix is real HTML per route, which is the case study I documented.

7. The canonical points somewhere else

A canonical tag tells Google which version of a page you consider the real one. Google treats it as a strong signal, not an order: if other signals contradict it, it may pick a different one.

Templates and SEO panels are the usual culprits. A canonical copied across a template points every page at the home page, and Google quietly stops indexing the rest.

If it is indexed and still does not show up for your search

Then it is not an indexing problem and none of the seven fixes above will move it. The page is competing and losing, which is a different job.

Check two things before anything else. Whether your page answers the same intent as the ones currently ranking, and whether you have two pages of your own competing for the same query.

How to verify what Google actually receives

Every check above can be done from a browser. One of them cannot, and it is the one that matters most on a JavaScript site: what the server hands the crawler before anything runs.

curl -s -A "Googlebot" https://your-site.com/ | wc -w
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://your-site.com/does-not-exist
curl -sI https://your-site.com/sitemap.xml
→ word count, a real 404, and a sitemap that answers 200

On Windows, PowerShell's curl is an alias for Invoke-WebRequest and grep does not exist, so use the Git Bash versions or the equivalents I list in the tools I use.

Watch it explained, by the people who built it

Three short videos from Google's own channels. They are the same source the links above point to, in video form:

• Help! Google Search isn't indexing my pages · Google Search Central, 5 minutes. Covers «discovered» and «crawled, currently not indexed», which are causes 2 and 3 above.

• How to read the Indexing Report · Google Search Central, 32 minutes, July 2026. Martin Splitt on when an unindexed page is a problem and when it is not.