Has Google actually indexed your website? Here is how to check properly, in about two minutes.

There is a specific kind of silence that follows a website launch. The site is live, it looks good, you have told people about it, and nothing happens. No enquiries. No traffic. You search for your business and find a competitor, a LinkedIn profile from 2014, and someone in another country with a similar name.

Before you conclude that SEO is a scam or that your web designer has let you down, there is one question worth answering first, because everything else depends on it: does Google actually have your website?

Not “does it rank”. Not “is it optimised”. Just — is it in there at all.

Indexed and ranking are not the same thing

This is worth thirty seconds because almost every confused conversation about search starts here.

Crawling is Google visiting your page. Indexing is Google deciding to keep it and file it away. Ranking is where it appears when someone searches something.

They happen in that order, and each one can fail independently. A page can be crawled but not indexed. It can be indexed but never rank for anything. What it cannot do is rank without being indexed — so if you are trying to work out why nobody is finding you, you check the indexing first. It takes two minutes and it eliminates the most expensive possible mistake, which is spending six months on content for a site Google cannot see.

The ten-second check

Go to Google and type this, with no space after the colon:

Use your own domain, obviously, and leave off the https:// and the www.

What comes back is a list of the pages Google holds for your site. Read it like this:

Two honest caveats. The page count Google shows is an estimate and is often wrong — treat it as “roughly this many”, not a number to report to anyone. And an empty result on a site that launched three days ago is completely normal. Google has not had time.

The check that actually settles it

The site: search tells you what Google is willing to show you today. Search Console tells you what Google actually thinks about your page, including the reasons it might be refusing to index it. It is free, it takes a few minutes to set up, and no serious diagnosis happens without it.

Once you are verified:

That distinction between the stored result and the live test matters more than it sounds. The main result tells you what Google saw the last time it visited, which might have been weeks ago. Test Live URL fetches the page as it exists right now. If those two disagree, that gap is usually where your problem is.

The five answers you can get, and what to do about each

1. URL is on Google

Indexed and eligible to appear. If you still cannot find yourself in search results, indexing is not your problem — ranking is, and that is a longer conversation about content, links and competition.

2. URL is on Google, but has issues

Indexed, but something is flagged — usually structured data or a mobile usability warning. It will still appear in results. Expand the panel, read the specific issue, and fix it when convenient. Rarely urgent.

3. URL is not on Google

The honest one. Expand the Page indexing section and read the reason given. The common ones:

• Not found (404) — Google went looking and the page wasn’t there. Fix the page or the link pointing at it.
• Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag — your site is actively telling Google to stay away. In WordPress this is often a single checkbox left ticked from the build. Settings → Reading → “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”.
• Blocked by robots.txt — a file at your site root is refusing the crawler access.
• Discovered – currently not indexed — Google knows the page exists but hasn’t got to it. Usually just time, on a new site.
• Crawled – currently not indexed — Google looked and decided not to keep it. This one is about quality or duplication, not a technical fault, and it is the hardest to fix.

4. URL is available to Google

You will see this after a live test. It means the page is fine right now, but is not yet in the index. Click Request Indexing and wait. This is the normal state for a page you published this morning.

5. Redirect error, or an unexpected redirect

Google is being bounced somewhere it did not expect. Often an http/https mismatch, or www and non-www versions of the site disagreeing about which one is real.

Check the whole site, not one page

URL Inspection answers for a single page. For the whole site, use the Pages report under Indexing in the left menu. It splits everything into indexed and not indexed, and groups the not-indexed pages by reason.

On a small business site, this report is usually more revealing than people expect. Tag archives, author pages, attachment pages and old draft URLs all show up here, and a site with fifteen real pages can easily have sixty URLs that Google has formed an opinion about.

While you are in there, check Sitemaps too. If your sitemap has never been submitted, or was last read two years ago, that is worth knowing.

What this looked like on my own site

I am running a 100-day experiment on this domain, publishing every number in public, so here is mine — including the part I would rather not have found.

I was rebuilding on a domain I had left dormant for years. The homepage loaded correctly in every browser I opened it in. And on 8 July 2026, Google came to crawl it and received a 404 Not Found.

Google does not retry indefinitely. It came, found nothing, drew the obvious conclusion and went away. Everything downstream of that was dead on arrival — not because the content was weak, but because the front door was returning an error to the only visitor that mattered.

This is the part worth paying attention to: there was no symptom. No error in the browser, no broken page, nothing a client would ever report. The only place it existed was in a Search Console report that nobody looks at until they have a reason to. I ran the baseline check on 28 July, found it inside two minutes, fixed it and started validation the same day. By 18 August the homepage was indexed and serving correctly over HTTPS.

A site can look perfect in every browser you own and still return an error to the only visitor that matters. Nothing on the page will tell you. Only Search Console will.

I have written up the full starting position — every zero, with sources and dates — in my day zero post, along with the four reasons a new website typically goes nowhere.

How long should you actually wait?

Rough, honest numbers rather than the reassuring version:

Requesting indexing helps, but it is a request, not an instruction. There is no queue-jumping option and anyone selling you one is selling you nothing.

Sites break quietly. A plugin update, a theme change, a migration, a redirect someone added in a hurry — none of these announce themselves, and all of them can drop pages out of the index while the site continues to look completely normal to you.