Your website isn’t showing up on Google: 7 real causes and how to spot them

Before you hire anyone, spend half an hour on these seven checks. You can do them yourself, they’re free, and in most cases they reveal that the problem is much simpler—and cheaper to fix—than it seemed.

1. Google hasn’t indexed your website

It seems obvious, but it’s the number-one cause. If Google doesn’t have your pages in its index, you can’t rank.

How to check: search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If you get no results, or far fewer pages than you actually have, that’s where the problem is.

Common causes: the site has only been live for a short time, you haven’t added it to Google Search Console, or something is blocking crawling (the next two points).

2. The robots.txt file is blocking crawling

It’s surprisingly common: the site is built in a test environment with crawling blocked, it goes live, and nobody remembers to remove the block.

How to check: go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: /, you’re telling Google to stay out of every page. Months of work thrown away over two words.

3. Forgotten noindex tags

Similar to the previous one, but harder to see, because it’s in the code of each page.

How to check: open your website, press Ctrl+U to view the source code, and search for noindex. If it appears inside a meta robots tag, that page is explicitly asking not to show up on Google.

4. Your website is a JavaScript app with no content in the HTML

Many modern websites are built with React, Vue or Angular and send the browser practically empty HTML that gets filled in afterward with JavaScript. Google ends up rendering it, but it takes longer and the result is worse.

And there’s a bigger problem: most AI search engine crawlers don’t execute JavaScript. If ChatGPT or Perplexity visits your website and finds only an empty container, it’ll never cite you.

How to check: press Ctrl+U on your homepage. If the text you see on screen isn’t in the source code, you have this problem. The solution involves server-side rendering or prerendering at publish time.

5. Nobody is searching for what you’ve written

Many websites are optimized for terms that only the company itself uses: brand names for its services, industry jargon, slogans. Nobody searches for “comprehensive transformation solutions”; people search for “make a website for my business.”

How to check: type into Google what you think your customer would look for. Do the results look like what you offer? If completely different things come up, you’ve picked the wrong words.

6. Your website takes too long to load

Speed affects how you rank, but above all it affects whether people stay. If the site takes more than three seconds to load, a good share of visitors leave before seeing anything.

How to check: run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Pay special attention to the real-user data section, not just the lab score.

By far the most common cause: unoptimized images. Photos weighing 4 MB, uploaded exactly as they come off the camera. Converting them to WebP and resizing them usually cuts the file size by more than 90%.

7. You don’t have authority yet

If your website is new and no other site links to it, Google has no reason to trust you over competitors with years of history. This isn’t something a technical tweak can fix: it’s built with time, content and real mentions.

How to get started: a Google Business Profile if you do business locally, reputable industry directories, collaborations, and content that someone would want to link to.

How long it takes to see results

To set realistic expectations: technical problems (points 1 through 4) usually show up within weeks once they’re fixed. Content and authority problems take three to six months to deliver solid results.

If someone guarantees you first place within a month, be wary: Google decides the order of the results, and nobody can promise it in a contract.