Why your website isn't showing up on Google — the 7 causes we see every week

Almost every week someone asks us the same question: "Our site has been live for months and it doesn't show up on Google. What's going on?"

The answer is rarely "you need more content" or "you need ads". It's usually a small technical issue that keeps Google from understanding the site at all — and most of them are a day's work to fix.

Here are the seven we see most often, roughly in order of frequency. Each comes with a quick way to check it yourself.

1. The site isn't registered in Google Search Console

Google will find your site on its own eventually, but "eventually" can mean weeks. Search Console is how you tell Google: this is my site, these are its pages, and here's when they last changed.

How to check: open search.google.com/search-console. If your site isn't there, add it as a Domain property (it covers www, non-www and https in one go). Then submit sitemap.xml under Sitemaps, and use URL Inspection to request indexing for the homepage.

2. The whole site is JavaScript and the page is empty until the code runs

Most modern sites (React, Vue and friends) send the browser a nearly empty page, then JavaScript draws the content. Google can execute JavaScript, but it does so in a delayed second pass, and sometimes gives up — that's the Crawled – currently not indexed status. AI tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest) mostly don't run JavaScript at all; they see a blank page.

How to check: open a page, press Ctrl+U (view source) and search for a sentence from the page. If all you find is <div id="root"></div> and .js files, this is your problem. The fix is called pre-rendering or server-side rendering: the page arrives with its content already in it.

3. Every page has the same title and description

If "Services", "About" and the homepage all carry the title "Company Name", Google sees duplicates and keeps only one. The <title> and meta description are the first things a search engine reads — and they are what shows up in the result itself.

How to check: open three different pages and look at the browser tab. If the titles match, there's work to do.

4. The canonical URL points somewhere else

The canonical tag tells Google "the original version of this page lives at this address". A common mistake: the site was built on a prototyping platform (Lovable, Webflow, a temporary domain), and after moving to the real domain the canonical still points to the old one. Google then treats your site as a copy of another site.

How to check: in the page source, find rel="canonical" and make sure it's your own domain, in exactly the form the site opens with (www or not).

5. www and non-www serve two copies

To Google, example.com and www.example.com are two different sites unless one redirects to the other permanently. Many hosts redirect "temporarily" (307) or not at all, and your ranking signals get split in half.

How to check: open both versions and see where the address bar settles. One should always redirect to the other, and every internal link, canonical tag and sitemap entry should use that final version.

6. robots.txt is blocking crawlers without you knowing

robots.txt is the gate crawlers read first. A stray Disallow: / left over from staging locks the whole site out. And these days it also matters that you allow the AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot…) if you want your company to appear in their answers.

How to check: open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Disallow: / under User-agent: * is the disaster case. Make sure there's a Sitemap: line pointing at your sitemap.

7. The sitemap lies about dates

Each sitemap entry has a "last modified" date (lastmod). Many systems stamp today's date on every page on every deploy, so the sitemap tells Google "everything changed!" daily. After a while Google ignores the dates entirely, and you lose the best tool for flagging real updates.

How to check: open yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and compare the lastmod values. If they're all identical (and equal to your last deploy), they aren't real.

The quick checklist

• Registered in Search Console, sitemap submitted.
• Page source contains the real content, not an empty div.
• Every page has its own title and description.
• Canonical points at your own domain.
• One domain version; the other redirects permanently.
• robots.txt allows crawlers, AI crawlers included.
• lastmod dates are honest.

If all seven are fine and you still don't rank, then it's a content, links and competition conversation — a topic for another post.

And if you'd like someone to review your site and hand you a clear, prioritised list of issues, book a free 30-minute session and we'll go through it together.