First: are you indexed, or just ranking poorly?
These are two different problems. Type site:yoursite.com into Google. If your pages appear, your website is indexed: your problem is a ranking problem (causes 3 to 7). If nothing shows up, Google does not know your website or refuses to display it (causes 1 and 2). This 10-second test steers everything that follows.
Cause 1: Google doesn't know your website
Google discovers pages by following links and reading sitemaps. A brand-new website with no inbound links and no declared sitemap can stay out of the index for weeks. Three actions fix the problem:
- Create a
sitemap.xmlfile at the root that lists your pages. - Declare that sitemap in Google Search Console (free) and request indexing of your homepage.
- Get at least one inbound link: a reputable business directory, your chamber of commerce, a partner.
Cause 2: you block Google without knowing it
This is the sneakiest cause, because it is invisible from your browser. Three classic blocks:
- An overly strict robots.txt. A
Disallow: /line forgotten by a developer (common on websites moved from staging to production) forbids all crawling. - A noindex tag set by a CMS option: on WordPress, the "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" box checked at setup and never unchecked.
- An overly aggressive firewall or CDN that serves crawlers a verification page. Google sees a wall, not your website. The same mechanism also blocks AI.
Cause 3: your pages are too thin
Google will happily index a 200-word page, but it will almost never rank it. A service page that says "Plumbing, all jobs, free quote" has nothing to compete with against a rival who describes their services, lead times, prices and service area in 800 words. The practical threshold we measure: below 300 words of real content, a page does not exist in the competition.
Cause 4: your content only exists in JavaScript
If your text only appears after a script runs (poorly configured single-page brochure sites, dynamically loaded content), Google sees it late, partially, or not at all, and most AI crawlers never see it. Simple test: view your page's source code (Ctrl+U) and search for a sentence from your text. If it is not there, you have this problem.
Cause 5: duplicates and conflicting signals
Your website responds on http and https, with and without www, and the canonical tags point to the wrong place? Google receives four versions of the same website and contradictory instructions. It then picks the version to index on its own, not necessarily the one you wanted. The fix: a single canonical version, and direct 301 redirects from all the others.
Cause 6: the website is slow or broken on mobile
Google crawls and ranks the mobile version first. A website that takes 8 seconds to load on a phone, or whose menu is unusable with a finger, starts with a measurable handicap: Core Web Vitals are among the ranking signals. This is almost never the cause of total invisibility, but it is often what keeps a website stuck on page 3.
Cause 7: your domain is simply too young
If everything else is in order, the time factor remains. A new domain with no history takes several weeks to settle in, even when well built. That is normal, and no provider can magically speed it up. What actually accelerates things: publishing useful content regularly and earning mentions. We covered realistic timelines in how long does SEO take to produce results.
How to identify your cause in 30 seconds?
Causes 1 to 6 are exactly what our audit measures: robots.txt, noindex tags, sitemap, real content per page, canonicals, redirects, mobile performance. You launch the analysis, you get the list of what is blocking you, with the exact fix for each point.