You paid for a website, it looks fine in your browser, and a customer tells you they couldn't find it on Google. Before anyone blames the design or the writing, settle a simpler question first: whether Google can read your website at all.
You can check that in about ten minutes with three checks. First, search Google for site:yourdomain.com and see whether your pages come up. Second, open Google Search Console (a free tool from Google) and read its Page indexing report. Third, open two files on your own site, yourdomain.com/robots.txt and yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, and make sure the first isn't telling crawlers to stay out and the second lists your real pages.
A healthy result: the site: search shows your home page and roughly the number of pages you have, Search Console says most pages are "Indexed" with nothing under "Blocked by robots.txt", the robots.txt has no Disallow: / under User-agent: *, and the sitemap shows "Success". Here is each step, and what to do when a result looks wrong.
Step 1: What a site: search tells you
Go to Google and type site: followed by your domain, with no space: site:example.com. Google then shows only pages from that domain. Your home page should appear near the top, and the titles should read like your pages, not "Home" or "Untitled". Any result count Google shows is an estimate that changes from search to search, so treat it as a rough gauge.
Say you have a home page, four service pages, an about page, a contact page and a dozen blog posts. That's nineteen pages, so anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five results is fine. Zero means Google has nothing from your site; on anything but a brand-new site, something is usually blocking it. A count far above your real page count usually means duplicates, such as tag pages.
Step 2: Setting up Google Search Console
Google Search Console is Google's free report on how it sees your site.
- Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google account your business controls, not a web designer's personal one.
- Choose "URL prefix" as the property type and enter your full address, including https:// and www if your site uses it.
- Verify ownership by uploading the small HTML file Google gives you to the site's root folder, or by pasting a meta tag into the home page's head section. Most site builders have a settings box for this.
- Wait a day or so for the reports to fill in; some take a few days to settle.
Step 3: Reading the Page indexing report
In the left menu, open "Indexing" and then "Pages". The top shows how many pages are indexed (in Google's library and able to appear in search) and how many are not, with reasons listed below.
Indexed. Google has read the page and can show it. This number should be close to your real page count; much higher usually means duplicates.
Not found (404). Google tried an address and your site answered "page not found". Normal for a page you removed on purpose, and very common after a redesign, when the old site's addresses (/services.php, /about-us) no longer exist. Fix it with redirects: each old address should send visitors and Google to the closest new page. An address with no replacement can be left alone; Google drops it over time.
Alternate page with proper canonical tag. Google found two versions of the same page and indexed the one your site named as the main version (the "canonical"). The http and https versions, or the same page with and without a trailing slash, land here. Usually fine, unless Google picked the wrong version.
Crawled, currently not indexed. Google read the page and decided not to keep it. That usually means the page is thin (a few lines of text, or a heading with nothing under it) or a near copy of another page. Give it real content that answers a real question, or fold it into the page it duplicates. Our post on showing up in AI search answers covers what real content looks like.
Discovered, currently not indexed. Google knows the address, usually from your sitemap, but hasn't fetched it yet. On a new site this often clears on its own within weeks. If it lingers, link the page from your menu and ask whether it's worth indexing.
Blocked by robots.txt. Google wanted to read the page and your robots.txt told it not to. For an admin or thank-you page, fine. For a page you want customers to find, it's the most important line in the report, and step 4 is the fix.
When you fix a page, paste its address into the inspection box at the top of Search Console and click "Request indexing" so Google comes back sooner.
Step 4: What to look for in robots.txt
A robots.txt file is a short text file at the root of your site that tells crawlers which parts they may read. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser. If it doesn't exist, that's fine; crawlers treat a missing file as "read everything".
The line to worry about is Disallow: / under User-agent: *. That pair tells every crawler to stay out, and it's a common leftover from a site builder's "hide while under construction" switch nobody turned off at launch. Disallow: with nothing after it, or Allow: /, means the opposite: come in.
Now look for AI crawlers. Each AI answer tool has its own named crawler: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, ClaudeBot for Claude, and Google-Extended for Google's Gemini products. (Regular Google Search uses Googlebot, a separate line.) Some hosts and security plugins block these by default. If your robots.txt has Disallow: / under any of those names, that tool can't read your site, and it won't recommend a business it can't read.
When we set this up for our own site, we kept it short: User-agent: * with Allow: /, each AI crawler listed by name with Allow: /, and a Sitemap: line at the end with the sitemap's full address, which is how a crawler that has never heard of you finds your pages.
Step 5: Submitting and checking your sitemap
A sitemap is a file, usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, that lists every page you want indexed and the date each last changed. Open it in your browser. It won't be pretty, but you can read the page addresses. Check that they're current, that nothing from the old site is still listed, and that home, services and contact are present. Ours lists the home page, every service page, about, contact and every post, and updates each time a post goes up.
Submit it once. In Search Console, open "Indexing" and then "Sitemaps", type sitemap.xml and click Submit. Within a day or so the status should read "Success" and the "Discovered pages" count should be close to the number of addresses in the file. "Couldn't fetch" means the address is wrong; "Has errors" is a job for whoever built the site. You don't need to resubmit after changes; Google rereads it on its own.
A sitemap tells Google what exists. It doesn't guarantee indexing; a listed page with nothing on it still lands under "Crawled, currently not indexed".
The ten-minute checklist: can Google read your website?
- Search
site:yourdomain.com. Home page shows, titles look right, count near your real page count. - Open
yourdomain.com/robots.txt. NoDisallow: /underUser-agent: *or any AI crawler's name, and aSitemap:line is present. - Open
yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. It loads, lists current addresses, and includes your key pages. - Search Console, Indexing, Pages. Indexed count close to your page count; every "Blocked by robots.txt" or "Not found (404)" entry has a plan.
- Search Console, Indexing, Sitemaps. Status "Success", and the discovered count makes sense.
- Paste your most important page into the inspection box. It should say "URL is on Google".
Repeat once a quarter, and whenever the site changes hands, gets redesigned or moves hosts. Those are the moments a Disallow: / sneaks in.
If Google can't read a page, nothing else you do to that page matters.
Once Google can read the site, the next step is schema markup: labelling your name, address, hours and services so search engines and AI tools can quote them.
How Deca Digital helps
Every website we build ships with a clean robots.txt, a sitemap that updates itself when a page is added, and Search Console connected to the owner's own account before launch. For an existing site, we run the checks above, fix the redirects and blocked files, and show you how to read the report yourself. We're based in Celina and work with businesses across North Texas and remotely anywhere in the US.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on your indexing report, book a free discovery call.