How to get your website on Google: indexing a new site step by step

Google finds most new websites on its own, but “on its own” can mean weeks, and one forgotten setting can mean never. This tutorial shows how to get your website on Google step by step: check whether it is already indexed, remove what hides it, add it to Search Console, submit your sitemap and ask Google to crawl your key pages. Then it goes through the usual reasons a site stays invisible.

You do not need to pay anyone for this. With access to your site builder and to your domain’s DNS settings, most owners can do it in an afternoon. Menu names are those of the English interfaces at the time of writing (October 2026).

Being indexed makes your pages eligible to appear; ranking well is the next job, covered in my guide to small business SEO.

How Google finds a new website

Three terms come up again and again. Here they are in one sentence each:

• Crawling: Googlebot, Google’s robot, visits a page and reads it.
• Indexing: Google stores the page in its index, the database its results are drawn from.
• Ranking: for each search, Google chooses which indexed pages to show, and in what order.

Google discovers pages mainly by following links from pages it already knows, and by reading the sitemaps that site owners submit. Most pages in its results were never submitted by anyone: its crawlers found them. A brand-new site starts with a handicap, because no other site links to it yet, so Google has no path to it. The steps below give it one, and make sure nothing turns Googlebot away when it arrives.

Step 1: check whether your website is already on Google

Start with a search that lists the pages Google holds for your domain. Type this into Google with your own domain, and no space after the colon:

site:yourbusiness.co.uk

If results appear, your site is in the index, and the question becomes which pages are missing. If nothing appears, Google has not indexed it yet. Treat the number of results as a rough indication, not a count.

Searching for your business name is not a reliable test. A new site can be indexed and still not show for its own name, especially when the name is a common word.

For a definite answer about one page, use URL Inspection in Google Search Console: paste the page’s full address into the bar at the top and press Enter. The verdict reads URL is on Google or URL is not on Google, followed by the reason, such as URL is unknown to Google for a page Google has never seen. If you do not use Search Console yet, step 3 sets it up; come back to this check afterwards.

Step 2: make sure your site is public and on its domain

On a brand-new site, the usual reason for being invisible has nothing to do with SEO: the site is still hidden from the public, or the domain does not point to it yet. Site builders keep new sites private while you build them, which is sensible, and the switch is easy to forget on launch day.

Two details catch people out. On Squarespace, a site on a free trial cannot be public, and its sitemap only loads once it is (Squarespace’s help on publishing or hiding a site). On Wix, each page also has its own indexing toggle in its SEO settings, and switching it off adds a noindex tag to that page (Wix’s help on letting search engines find your site). Shopify, for its part, may ask you to choose a plan before the password can come off.

Connect the domain, then test both addresses

In my own projects, connecting the domain is the last step before launch. Once the client has approved the design and the copy, I write the page titles and descriptions, prepare a few articles in advance, then point the domain at the site and publish. Until that step, there is nothing at your address for Google to find.

Once the DNS records are in, type your address with and without www: both should open the site on https, one redirecting to the other. If one fails, check the records where your domain is managed. The only real trap I have hit when connecting domains came down to one character: at OVH, a CNAME target such as ext-cust.squarespace.com. needs its final dot, otherwise the www address never loads. My guide to DNS records explains why.

Hand-coded sites: look for leftovers from testing

A site built by a developer, or with AI and hosted on GitHub Pages or elsewhere, has no switch to flip. What hides it is usually a line left over from the test version. Open yourbusiness.co.uk/robots.txt in your browser. These two lines tell every crawler to stay out of the whole site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

A normal small business site needs the opposite: an empty Disallow line, and the address of your sitemap.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: https://www.yourbusiness.co.uk/sitemap.xml

Then open your home page, right-click, choose View page source and search for noindex. This tag asks search engines to leave the page out:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Step 3: add your site to Google Search Console

Search Console is Google’s free tool for site owners, and the place where you see your site the way Google does. The next two steps need it.

1. Sign in at search.google.com/search-console with a Google account that belongs to the business, not to whoever builds the site.
2. Add a Domain property and type your bare domain, without https:// or www.
3. Copy the TXT record that Search Console shows, add it in your domain’s DNS settings, then click Verify. Keep the record afterwards: removing it ends the verification.

If you have just connected the domain, add the record while the DNS settings are still open. My Google Search Console tutorial shows each screen, what to do if verification fails and how to read the reports once data comes in.

Step 4: submit your sitemap

A sitemap is a file that lists the pages you want Google to know about. You rarely have to create one: Squarespace, Wix and Shopify publish it at /sitemap.xml, and WordPress at /wp-sitemap.xml, or /sitemap_index.xml with Yoast SEO. Open that address in your browser first: a list of links means it works.

1. In Search Console, open Indexing > Sitemaps.
2. Under Add a new sitemap, type sitemap.xml (or your platform’s version) and click Submit.
3. Check the status. Success means Google has read the file. Couldn’t fetch is common on a new site: make sure the address opens in your browser, then give it a day or two.

You submit a sitemap once. Google comes back to it on its own, so new pages get picked up without a new submission.

Step 5: request indexing for your key pages

The sitemap tells Google what exists; a request asks it to come and look soon. On a new site, keep requests for the pages that matter most:

• the home page;
• each main service or product page;
• the contact page, or the page with your address if you serve a local area.

For each of them:

1. Paste the page’s full address into the URL Inspection bar at the top of Search Console.
2. Click Request indexing. Search Console first tests the live page, which can take a minute or two.
3. Wait for the confirmation that indexing was requested, then move on to the next page.

Only owners and full users of the Search Console property can request indexing, and there is a daily quota. Google’s page on asking Google to recrawl your URLs is also clear on two points: asking several times does not get a page crawled any faster, and a request does not guarantee that the page will be indexed. For the rest of the site, the sitemap does the job.

Step 6: give Google links to follow

A new site has no links pointing to it yet, so give Google a few to follow, inside and outside your site.

Inside the site, every page you want on Google should be reachable from your menu or from another page. A page that nothing links to, known as an orphan page, is found more slowly and looks minor to Google, even if it is in your sitemap.

Outside the site, a handful of genuine links brings Googlebot, and customers, to your door:

• your Google Business Profile, which also puts you on Google Maps (my Google Business Profile setup guide covers it);
• your social profiles: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest;
• your trade association’s member directory, and local listings such as Yell;
• suppliers and partners who list the businesses they work with;
• the local paper, when you have real news.

Skip paid link packages and directories that exist only to sell links. They do not speed anything up, and buying links to manipulate rankings breaks Google’s spam policies.

Why your website is still not on Google: the usual blockers

If a page is still missing two or three weeks after these steps, inspect it in Search Console. The reason under the verdict usually points to one of these causes:

Once the fix is live, click Test live URL to check that Google can now index the page, then Request indexing. If the reason also appears in Indexing > Pages, open it and click Validate fix.

If you bought a domain that had a previous life, also open Security & Manual Actions: a penalty given to the old site would show there.

When none of these applies, the missing ingredient is time. My article on how long SEO takes separates the wait for indexing from the much longer one for rankings.

Indexed is only the start: AI answers and rankings

Once your pages are in, two things decide what they bring you.

Google’s AI answers draw on the same index. To be eligible as a source in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page needs to be indexed and allowed to show a snippet, and Google lists no extra technical requirement (Google’s page on AI features). Other assistants run their own crawlers: ChatGPT search, for example, leaves out sites that block its crawler, OAI-SearchBot. My guide to robots.txt for AI crawlers shows which bots to let in.

Rankings are a separate job. For Pilotech, an air conditioning installer in the Paris area, the site took about a month to build. It reached a top ranking for one of its searches within a day or two of going live, which is rare, and the first lead arrived three weeks after publication. Most new sites need far longer, and what gets them there is SEO: one page per specific search, useful content, then links and mentions over the following months.

The platform matters less than people fear. Squarespace keeps its code closed, which can give custom-coded sites an edge, yet a Squarespace site I built for Pilotech ranks first or second on Google. Get the page titles, descriptions and keywords right, and you give yourself every chance. If yours runs on Squarespace, my Squarespace SEO tutorial covers the settings to get right next.

How to get your website on Google: the launch checklist

Tick these off on launch day:

1. The site is public: Squarespace on Public, the Wix indexing switch on, the WordPress box unticked, the Shopify password removed.
2. The domain is connected, and the address opens on https with and without www.
3. Your robots.txt does not block the site, and no page you need carries a noindex tag.
4. Search Console has a verified Domain property, owned by the business.
5. The sitemap is submitted and shows Success.
6. Indexing is requested for the home page and the main service pages.
7. Your Google Business Profile and social profiles link to the site.
8. A week later, a site: search and URL Inspection show what is in.

You do not need me, or anyone else, for this list. Hand it over when pages stay out of the index after you have been through the blockers above, or when you move an established site to a new domain or platform, where one missed redirect can cost rankings you already have. That kind of technical check is part of my SEO service.