How do I check if Google can find my website?
Search site:yourdomain.com in Google to see roughly which pages it has saved. For the exact list, set up Google Search Console, which is free, and open the Pages report. It shows every page Google skipped and the reason, and it lets you ask Google to look at a page again.
The one minute check
Type site:yourdomain.com into Google, with your real address and no space after the colon. Google lists the pages it has saved from your site.
Count them. If your site has 15 pages and Google shows 15, you are in good shape. If it shows 4, most of your site is invisible, and no amount of nice design will fix that.
The count is rough. For the real answer you need Search Console.
Set up Google Search Console
- Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google account.
- Click Add property and type your website address.
- Prove the site is yours. Google gives you a short code to add where you bought your domain, or a small file or tag to put on the site. If someone built the site for you, send them the code and it takes them five minutes.
- Wait a day or two for the reports to fill in.
Use an account you will still have in five years. We have seen owners lose access because the account belonged to a web designer who moved on.
Read the Pages report
Open Indexing, then Pages. The top shows how many pages are indexed and how many are not. Under that is a list of reasons. These are the ones you will see most:
- Discovered, currently not indexed. Google knows the page exists and has not visited it yet.
- Crawled, currently not indexed. Google visited and decided not to save it for now. Thin or duplicate pages land here.
- Page with redirect. The address forwards somewhere else. That is normal for old addresses.
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag. The page is a copy that points to the main version. Usually fine.
- Blocked by robots.txt. Your own site told Google to stay out. On a live site this is almost always a mistake left over from when it was being built.
- Excluded by noindex tag. The page carries a tag that says do not list me. Same story.
Click any reason to see the pages under it.
Ask Google to look again
- Click URL inspection in the left menu and paste the page address.
- Read the result. "URL is on Google" means it is indexed and you can stop.
- If it says "URL is not on Google", click Request indexing.
Inspect before you request. The Pages report can run days behind. We checked a page it listed as not indexed, and the live inspection showed it had been on Google the whole time.
Send Google your sitemap
A sitemap is a file that lists every page on your site. Most site builders make one for you at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. In Search Console, open Sitemaps, paste that address and click Submit. Do it again after you add pages.
When it is not you
A brand new site takes weeks to be fully indexed even when everything is right. If a month has gone by and half your pages are still missing, look for two addresses for the same page, pages nothing links to, or a leftover block from the build. Two addresses for the same page was the most common cause we fixed this month.