How to check if my website is on Google

📅 August 21, 2026 | ✍️ Don Curtin

If you only do one technical check this month, make it this one. Everything else — content plans, schema debates, “why isn’t AI recommending us” — sits on top of a blunt question: has Google actually stored your pages?

I’m going to keep this short and slightly annoying, because the internet loves to turn a two-minute check into a twelve-step course.

The site: search (two minutes)

  1. Open Google in a normal browser window.
  2. Type site:yourdomain.co.uk — swap in your real domain, no https://, no trailing junk.
  3. Look at what comes back.

Useful result: your homepage and a handful of real pages. Good enough signal that you’re not invisible.

Thin or weird result: a contact page, an old WordPress tag archive, and nothing that looks like your current site. That needs follow-up.

Nothing: either Google isn’t indexing you in any serious way, or you’re searching the wrong domain (www vs non-www, a staging URL you forgot existed, a site that moved).

The site: operator is not a legal document. It’s a torch in a dark room. Don’t treat a quiet result as proof you’ve been banned. Do treat it as a reason to open Search Console instead of guessing.

Search Console URL Inspection (the proper check)

If you have Google Search Console set up — and you should — use URL Inspection on your homepage.

You’re looking for language along the lines of the URL being on Google, or clear reasons it isn’t. “Discovered — currently not indexed” and “Crawled — currently not indexed” are common, and they are not the same as “Google hates you.” They mean Google knows the URL exists and hasn’t chosen to keep it in the index right now.

One thing I keep repeating because people skip it: the query report in Search Console is incomplete. Google has said for years that it doesn’t show everything. If you’re diagnosing “are we on Google at all?”, URL Inspection and the Pages report beat obsessing over one keyword row.

What “indexed” does not mean

Indexed means Google has a version of the page it could show. It does not mean:

So if site: looks healthy and customers still can’t find you by name, you’re probably not in index hell. You’re in Maps / Business Profile territory, or impressions without clicks.

If the site isn’t indexed and you’re also invisible on Maps, fix indexing and the listing as separate jobs. Mixing them into one panic burns a week.

Common reasons pages don’t show

I’ll stay practical, not encyclopaedic:

I’m not going to give you a DIY list for every server config under the sun. If you can see noindex in the page source or a plugin labelled “discourage search engines”, turn that off and request indexing. If you can’t find an obvious switch, that’s a good moment to ask for a free visibility check rather than following a random YouTube “secret fix.”

How this fits the bigger triage

This check answers fork 1 on why doesn’t my business show up on Google?. Do it once properly. Then stop arguing with ghosts.

Anyway. Torch first. Strategy second.

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