You paid for a website, it looks good, it went live three months ago. You search Google for your company name or the service you sell, and you're nowhere. It's one of the most common questions we get, and almost every time it starts with a confusion: "I'm not on Google" means two completely different things, and the fix is different for each.
Either Google doesn't know you exist, meaning your site isn't in the index and can't appear for any search at all. Or it knows you, but puts you on page 4, where nobody looks.
These are separate problems with separate causes. If you start writing blog posts when your actual problem is a noindex left behind in the code, you can work for months and get nothing. So before anything else, run the test below.
First test: are you in the index or not
Type this into Google, exactly like this, with your own domain:
site:yourdomain.com
What you see tells you where you stand:
- Zero results → Google doesn't have your site in its index. Skip straight to the indexing section.
- A few pages show up, but not all → partial indexing. You have a technical problem on part of the site.
- All your pages show up → you're indexed. Your problem is ranking, not indexing. Skip to part two.
The test takes ten seconds and saves you months. Run it before you ask anyone for a quote.
Case 1: Google doesn't know you exist
A noindex left over from development
The most mundane cause and by far the most frustrating. While the site is being built, it's kept hidden from Google with a noindex instruction. At launch, someone forgets to remove it.
It's easy to check: open the site, right-click → "View page source" and search for noindex. If you find it inside a <meta name="robots"> tag, that's your entire problem. It takes five minutes to fix.
On WordPress it's even easier to miss: there's a checkbox under Settings → Reading, "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". If that's ticked, nothing else matters.
robots.txt is blocking access
The robots.txt file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt tells search engines where they're allowed to go. A Disallow: / in there blocks the entire site.
This happens more often than you'd think, and it's usually another leftover from the staging environment, copied to production along with everything else.
The site is too new and has no links
Google discovers websites by following links. If your domain is new and nobody points to it, not from a social profile, not from a directory, not from a partner, Google has no route to reach you.
The fix isn't complicated: add the site to Google Search Console, submit your sitemap and request indexing for the important pages. It's free, and it's the first thing anyone launching a website should do.
Then put a few real links out there: your Google Business profile, your Facebook and Instagram pages, the company LinkedIn, your email signature. These aren't links that lift your rankings, but they are roads Google can travel to find you.
Content only appears after JavaScript runs
If your site is built as an application that loads all its content from JavaScript after the page opens, Google has to take an extra step to see the text. It usually manages, but with a delay of days or weeks, and AI search systems often don't do it at all.
Here's how to check: open the page, right-click → "View page source", then use Ctrl+F to look for a paragraph you can see on screen. If the text isn't in the source, your content doesn't exist until JavaScript runs.
The answer is static generation or server-side rendering. The sites we build ship ready-made HTML for exactly this reason. We wrote about it at length in the article on how to appear in ChatGPT and AI Overviews.
A missing or broken sitemap
A sitemap is the list of your pages, in a file Google reads. It isn't mandatory, but on a new site it's the difference between "discovered in two days" and "discovered in two months".
Check whether it exists at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and whether you've submitted it in Search Console.
Case 2: you're indexed, but you don't rank
This is where things get less technical and more uncomfortable.
You're searching for words that aren't on your site
It sounds obvious, but it's cause number one. You sell "custom furniture", yet the site says "personalised interior solutions" everywhere. Google doesn't guess at marketing synonyms. It matches what the person typed against what's written on the page.
Open your services page and read it as a customer who has never heard of you. Are the exact words they'd type into Google actually there, in the text? If not, that's your problem.
One page for ten services
A "Services" page listing ten different things ranks well for none of them. Google wants one page per search intent.
If you build brochure sites, online stores and mobile apps, you need three separate pages, each written properly. That's how our own site is built: distinct pages for business websites, for online stores and for mobile apps.
You don't have a Google Business profile
If you sell locally, this is the biggest hole there is. For searches like "plumber Timișoara", Google shows the map with three companies first, and only then the regular results. Without a verified Google Business profile, you're not even in the running for that part of the page, no matter how good your website is.
It's free, it takes an hour, and for a local business it brings in more than the first six months of on-site optimisation.
The competition is simply ahead of you
Sometimes nothing is broken. You're chasing a term contested by companies that are ten years old with hundreds of sites linking to them, and you've been online for three months.
That's not a problem to fix, it's a problem of patience and choice: start with longer, more specific phrases where you can actually break through. "Build an online store in Timișoara" is a fight you can win. "Online store" isn't.
Nearly empty pages
Three paragraphs and a contact form aren't enough to be treated as a good result. Word count in itself doesn't matter. What matters is whether the page fully answers the person's question or leaves them searching again.
Case 3: you show up, but nobody clicks
You're at positions 8–20. Technically you "appear on Google". In practice almost nobody gets there, because the first three results take most of the clicks.
The good news is that moving from position 12 to 6 is far easier than moving from nowhere to 12. Check Search Console under Performance to see which terms already put you on page 2, and improve exactly those pages. It's the cheapest growth available to you.
Look at what your result actually says, too: the title and description are your advert. A title that states plainly what the person gets earns clicks even from position 7.
How long it realistically takes
- Indexing, once you've fixed what was broken: from a few hours to two weeks.
- First rankings on long, specific phrases: 2–4 months.
- Main competitive terms: 6–12 months of sustained work.
Anyone promising you the top spot in 30 days is either selling something other than what you think, or betting on terms nobody searches for. We went through what real budgets look like in the article on what SEO costs in Romania.
The order to check in
site:yourdomain.com: are you in the index or not?- Search for
noindexin the page source and check the WordPress setting. - Open
yourdomain.com/robots.txt. - Connect Search Console and submit your sitemap.
- Check whether your text is in the page source or only appears via JavaScript.
- Claim your Google Business profile, if you sell locally.
- Read your service pages: do they contain the words customers actually search for?
- Split separate services into separate pages.
The first four can be sorted out in an afternoon. The rest is months of work, but without the first four it doesn't count.
In closing
Most of the time, "I'm not on Google" isn't an SEO problem at all. It's a setting left wrong or an unclaimed Google Business profile. Check the free, fast things first. Only if all of them are in order and still nothing happens do you have a problem worth a budget.
If you want to know which of the three situations you're in, write to us with your website address. We'll look and tell you plainly what needs fixing, including when the answer is "nothing, you just need to wait longer".
And if you conclude the problem is the website itself rather than its visibility, here is how we handle optimisation and what a retainer actually includes.