Why isn't my website showing up on Google at all?
Worth sorting promptly
If you can't find your own site by searching for your business name, the most likely explanation isn't competition or rankings — it's that your site is actively telling Google not to list it. This is startlingly common, it's nearly always an accident, and it's usually a one-checkbox fix.
The single most common cause
WordPress has a setting under Settings → Reading called “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. It exists so a site under construction doesn't get listed before it's ready. It gets ticked during the build, and then — often enough that it's the first thing to check — nobody unticks it at launch.
The result is a completely functional website that is invisible in search, sometimes for years, while the owner assumes their SEO is simply poor.
Other platforms have the same switch under different names — Shopify, Squarespace, Wix and Webflow all have a “hide from search engines” or “password protect” option that does the equivalent.
The two different ways a site gets hidden
These are frequently confused and the difference matters. A noindex tag says “you may read this page, but don't list it”. Google reads it and complies. This is the effective way to keep something out of search.
A robots.txt block says “don't read this page at all”. That's a different instruction, and it has a counter-intuitive consequence: because Google can't read the page, it can't see a noindex tag on it either. A page blocked in robots.txt can still appear in results — as a bare link with no description, because Google knows the address exists but was told not to look.
So if the goal is genuinely to hide something, noindex is the tool. And if a page is both blocked in robots.txt and marked noindex, the block wins and the noindex is never seen — which is why pages sometimes refuse to disappear.
If it isn't blocked, what else?
A brand new site simply may not have been crawled yet — that can take days to weeks. Registering the site in Google Search Console and submitting a sitemap speeds it up considerably and is free.
A site can also be hidden behind a password, be entirely built in a way search engines can't follow, or have been penalised. But check the accidental block first: it costs two minutes and it's the answer more often than anything else.
How to check this yourself
- Search Google for site:yourbusiness.co.uk — with no space after the colon. This lists everything Google has indexed for your domain.
- If it returns nothing at all, your site isn't in the index and something is blocking it.
- Visit yourbusiness.co.uk/robots.txt in a browser. If you see “Disallow: /” under “User-agent: *”, your whole site is blocked from being read.
- On WordPress, check Settings → Reading for the “Discourage search engines” tick box. On other platforms, look for a “hide from search engines” option in the SEO or site settings.
- Then set up Google Search Console — it will tell you directly, per page, why something isn't indexed.
What to ask your web person
Copy this. It's phrased so you don't have to know the jargon to ask for the right thing.
Our site doesn't appear in Google even when searching our exact business name. Could you check whether we're serving a noindex tag or blocking crawlers in robots.txt — and if it's a leftover from the build, remove it and submit the sitemap in Google Search Console?
Want to know if this applies to your site?
Gus checks this and everything else in the free check-up, then explains what he found in plain English. It's free, there's no account, and it takes about a minute.