How to get your website on Google

Google finds most public websites on its own within days to weeks — there is nothing to buy and no form that puts you "in" Google. What you can do is confirm it has happened and nudge it along faster, using two free tools from Google: Search Console and an XML sitemap. If anyone tells you to pay to be indexed, walk away; getting listed costs nothing.

The confusion usually comes from mixing up two different things. Being indexed means Google knows your pages exist and can show them in search. Ranking means appearing high enough for someone to actually find you. This page is about the first one — getting on Google at all. Once you are listed, why isn't my website ranking is the next problem, and a different one.

How Google finds and indexes a website

Google runs an automated program — its crawler, Googlebot — that follows links across the web. When another site links to yours, or you submit your address through Search Console, Googlebot visits, reads the page, and decides whether to store it in the index. That is the whole loop: discover, crawl, index. Google's own crawling and indexing documentation describes it in more detail, but for a small business that is the shape of it.

Three things matter here. First, you do not pay for any of it — indexing is free, automatic, and not for sale. Second, it is not instant; a brand-new site with no inbound links can take a couple of weeks before Google notices it exists. Third, Google chooses what to index. It will not store every page on every site, and a page being crawled is not the same as a page being indexed. Knowing that distinction saves a lot of needless panic later.

The good news for most established businesses: if your site has been online for a while and anyone links to it, you are almost certainly already on Google. Type site:yourdomain.com.au into Google — with your real domain — and you will see the pages it has indexed. If results come back, the rest of this page is about confirming and tidying, not rescuing.

The 3 things to do yourself

You do not need to "submit your website to Google" in the way old guides describe — there is no master list to join. You need to do 3 specific things, all free, all worth an hour once.

1. Verify the site in Google Search Console. Search Console is Google's free dashboard for site owners. Verifying ownership — usually by adding a small file or a DNS record — gives you a direct line: you can see which pages are indexed, ask Google to crawl a specific page, and get told when something is wrong. If you do nothing else on this list, do this one. It is the single tool that turns "I hope we're on Google" into "I can see exactly what's on Google." More on what Google Search Console is if the name is new to you.

2. Submit an XML sitemap. A sitemap is a machine-readable list of every page you want Google to know about. Most website platforms — WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix — generate one automatically, usually at yourdomain.com.au/sitemap.xml. You submit that address once inside Search Console, and from then on Google has a reliable map of your site instead of relying purely on finding links. This matters most for pages that nothing links to internally — they can otherwise sit undiscovered for a long time. Here is what an XML sitemap is in plain terms.

3. Make sure nothing is blocking the crawler. This is the one that quietly sinks small businesses. A file called robots.txt sits at the root of your site and tells crawlers where they may and may not go. A single stray line — Disallow: / — tells Google to stay out of the entire site, and it will obey. The other common culprit is a noindex tag left switched on after a site rebuild, or a "discourage search engines" checkbox still ticked in your platform's settings. Check what robots.txt is and confirm yours is not locking the door. A surprising number of "we're invisible on Google" cases are exactly this — a developer flipped a switch before launch and never flipped it back.

Common variations

A brand-new domain with no history. Patience plus a push. Register the site, verify it in Search Console, submit the sitemap, then use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing on your most important pages. Then wait — days to a couple of weeks is normal. Getting one good inbound link (a directory, a supplier, a local association) does more to speed discovery than any amount of resubmitting.

A single page that won't show up when the rest of the site is fine. Open that exact URL in Search Console's URL Inspection tool. It tells you whether the page is indexed and, if not, why. Usually it is one of three things: nothing on your site links to it, it is blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag, or Google has seen it and decided it is too thin or too similar to another page to bother. The walkthrough at why isn't my page on Google covers the fixes for each.

"Discovered – currently not indexed." This exact phrase appears in Search Console and confuses everyone the first time. It means Google knows the page exists but has chosen not to index it yet — usually a quality or priority judgement, not an error. It is most common on large sites and thin pages. The fix is rarely technical: improve the page so it is genuinely worth indexing, make sure it is well linked from elsewhere on your site, and give it time. Requesting indexing repeatedly does not override Google's judgement here.

What Search Console shows you

Once verified, Search Console becomes the honest mirror most business owners never knew they were missing. The Pages report (sometimes labelled Coverage) lists every URL Google has tried to index and sorts them into indexed, not indexed, and why. The URL Inspection tool checks any single address on demand. The Sitemaps section confirms Google read your sitemap and how many of its URLs made it into the index.

The number that matters first is simple: does the count of indexed pages roughly match the number of real pages on your site? If you have 25 pages and Search Console shows 24 indexed, you are in good shape. If it shows 3, something is blocking the rest, and the report will usually tell you what. This is also where Google emails you when it finds a serious problem — which is reason enough to verify even if you read nothing else in the dashboard.

When this isn't enough

Getting on Google is the floor, not the finish line. Plenty of businesses are perfectly well indexed and still never seen, because being in the index and being found in it are different achievements — the second is about ranking against everyone else selling what you sell.

If your pages are indexed but no one arrives, the problem has moved on from crawling to competing, and the answers live elsewhere: why isn't my website ranking walks through the usual causes, and you can run your own SEO health check to see where your site stands before paying anyone for advice. If you are starting from scratch and want the full sequence in order, our small business SEO checklist lays out indexing, the technical basics, and the on-page work as one path. Get indexed first — it costs nothing and takes an afternoon — then earn the ranking.