Why isn't my site showing in Google? 5 checks founders skip
Updated 10 November 2026
Most sites missing from Google have one of five fixable problems: a noindex tag, a robots.txt that blocks crawlers, a wrong or missing canonical tag, no sitemap, or a page that gives Google nothing clear to show. You can check all five in about 15 minutes.
You launched, you shared the link, and you searched your own name. Nothing. It feels like Google is ignoring you. Usually it is not personal. Something small is telling it to look away, or has not told it you exist yet.
Before you start: a new site can take days or weeks to appear, and none of these checks can promise a ranking. They only remove the things that can stop you being indexed at all.
1. Check for a noindex tag
A noindex tag tells search engines to keep the page out of results. It is easy to ship by accident, because many site builders and staging setups turn it on by default.
View the page source (Ctrl+U) and search for noindex. If you find this in the head, that is your answer:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">Remove it, or switch off the "discourage search engines" style setting in your builder, then redeploy.
2. Check that robots.txt is not blocking you
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see the lines below, you have told every crawler to stay out of the whole site:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /A normal public site allows crawling and points to its sitemap.
3. Check your canonical tag
A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page. If it is missing, the same page at several addresses can be treated as duplicates. If it points at the wrong page, Google may index that other page instead of yours.
In our free audits of 365 homepages, 137 of the 251 sites with two or more issues (55%) had no canonical tag, the most common finding. That is our own sample, not the whole web, but it shows how often it is skipped. See the full numbers.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/">Not sure how to add it on your stack? Use the canonical tag checker or a guide for WordPress, Shopify, Next.js or Webflow.
4. Give Google a clear page to show
A page can be indexed and still never get clicked if the result looks empty. Three tags do most of the work:
- One H1 that says what the page is about.
- A meta description under 160 characters, different on each page. 94 of our 251 sites (37%) had none.
- A short, specific title under about 60 characters.
Open Graph tags help your link look good when shared on LinkedIn, Slack or X. They do not decide your Google ranking, but a blank preview costs you clicks from every share.
5. Tell Google you exist
Google finds new sites mostly through links, so a brand-new site with no links can sit unseen. Two free steps help:
- Add your site to Google Search Console and submit your sitemap (usually at
/sitemap.xml). - Use the URL Inspection tool on your homepage. It shows whether Google has indexed it and, if not, why.
Then earn a few real links: a launch post, a directory listing, a link from your own GitHub or LinkedIn profile.
Run the whole list in one go
Marlo's free audit crawls your homepage and checks the title, description, headings, canonical and social tags, with the fix for each finding. No signup.
Written by Marlo's maker. Marlo is open source (AGPL-3.0) and the audit code is public.