Almost every case has one of six causes, and they are quick to tell apart once you know the order to check them in. Start at the top — most sites stop at the first or second.

The question hides two very different situations, and telling them apart is the whole job. Either Google does not have your pages at all, or it has them and is showing them below the point where anybody looks. The fixes have nothing in common, so guessing wastes weeks.

Why is my website not showing up on Google?

The usual causes, in the order worth checking, are: the site is too new to have been indexed, a noindex tag is telling Google to leave it out, robots.txt is blocking the crawler, the content only appears after JavaScript runs, the page is a duplicate of another one, or the page is indexed but ranking too low for you to find it. The last is by far the most common, and it is a different problem from the first five.

Work down that list rather than starting with the interesting theories. The expensive mistake is a business that spends three months on content while a single noindex left over from the staging site quietly keeps everything out of the index.

Step one: is anything indexed at all?

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If results appear, your site is indexed and the problem is ranking rather than indexing. If nothing appears, Google does not have your pages, and the cause is one of the blocking problems rather than a ranking one. For a single page, paste the URL into the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, which reports whether that exact URL is indexed and why not.

That one search splits the problem in half in about ten seconds, and it is the only diagnostic step that should come before all the others. Everything below assumes you have run it.

If nothing is indexed: the four blockers

These are the causes worth ruling out, and all four are settings rather than judgements — which means they have definite answers.

  • A noindex tag. A single line in the page's HTML that asks search engines to leave it out. It is the correct setting for a staging site and a disaster on a live one, and the switch is often a checkbox in the CMS marked something like "discourage search engines".
  • A robots.txt block. A Disallow rule stopping the crawler from fetching the page at all. Same origin story: right for staging, forgotten at launch.
  • Content that needs JavaScript. If the server sends a near-empty shell and the text is assembled afterwards, Google may index the shell. Covered in the content Google cannot see.
  • Nothing links to it. Google finds pages by following links and reading sitemaps. A page with no internal links and no sitemap entry may simply never be discovered.

TrustCtrl reports all four from one visit: it reads your robots.txt, flags every page carrying a noindex tag, compares the server HTML with the rendered page, and validates the URLs in your sitemap. Each finding names the exact page and what was found, so the answer is a list rather than a theory.

Why can I not find my website when I search my company name?

If searching your company name finds nothing, the site is almost certainly not indexed at all, because a brand name is the easiest query in the world to rank for. Check site:yourdomain.com first. If that also returns nothing, look for a noindex tag or a robots.txt block before assuming anything about competition or keywords.

The exception is a genuinely ambiguous name. If your company shares its name with a film, a town or a much larger business, you may be indexed and buried. The site: search settles it either way.

If you are indexed but invisible: it is a ranking problem

This is where most sites actually are, and it is the harder half — but it is also the half where the work pays off, because you are competing rather than blocked.

Three things move it, in rough order of return. Make sure each page targets a question somebody actually asks, rather than describing your services in your own vocabulary. Make sure the page's title and description say clearly what it answers. And check that the technical basics are not holding you back: speed, mobile layout, and pages that load without error.

You do not have to guess at which. Connect Google Search Console and you can see which queries already show your pages, at what position, and how often people click. That turns "we need to do SEO" into a short list of specific pages. We go through it in the Search Console guide.

Could it simply be too soon?

Days to a few weeks for a straightforward site, and the range is wide because it depends on how Google finds you. Submitting a sitemap in Search Console and earning a few links from sites that are already crawled shortens it considerably. If nothing has appeared after a month, treat it as a blocking problem rather than a waiting problem.

That one-month line is worth holding to. Waiting is a reasonable explanation in week two and an excuse in week six. More on the timeline in how long it takes to appear on Google.

What to do now

Run the site: search. If it comes back empty, you have a blocker, and the four above cover almost every case. If it comes back full, you have a ranking problem, and the work is in what your pages say and how they are presented.

TrustCtrl runs that whole list on a schedule rather than once, and it also checks whether AI assistants can read your site, which is increasingly a second front door. There is a Simple view for owners and a Technical view for whoever maintains the site.