My website isn't showing on Google. What's wrong?

First: not indexed, or just not ranking?

These feel the same and aren't. Search site:yourdomain.com. If your pages appear, you're indexed and the issue is ranking position, not visibility. If nothing appears, you're genuinely not in Google's index, which is a more fundamental problem. Establish which before doing anything else, because the fixes are opposite.

If you're not indexed

A handful of causes account for most of it. Search Console's Pages report names the specific one:

• A leftover noindex tag or robots.txt block from staging. An all-too-common launch mistake.
• A brand-new site Google simply hasn't crawled yet.
• A structure or JavaScript render path crawlers can't get through.
• No sitemap and no inbound links, so nothing points Google to it.

How to actually get it indexed

Once you know the cause, the fixes are quick. Work through these in order:

• Remove any leftover noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag, and any Disallow in robots.txt that blocks the pages.
• Verify the site in Google Search Console, by DNS or an HTML tag, so you can see and control indexing.
• Submit an XML sitemap in Search Console so Google has a map of every page.
• Use the URL Inspection tool on a key page, then click Request Indexing to push it into the crawl queue.
• Add internal links from pages Google already knows, your homepage or navigation, so crawlers can reach the new pages.
• Give it a few days, then re-inspect. Search Console reports the current status and, if it is still blocked, exactly why.

If you're indexed but invisible

Then it's a ranking problem, and 'not showing' just means you're not on the first page for what you searched. That's the normal state of a new or under-optimised site, and the fix is the ordinary SEO work, relevance, authority, time, not an emergency.

The search that hides your own site

Searching your exact business name should surface you; if even that fails, you're likely not indexed. But searching a competitive generic term and not seeing yourself is expected, not a fault. And Google personalises and localises results, so what you see isn't what everyone sees. Check in an incognito window or a rank tracker, not your logged-in browser.