Guide
How to tell if your website is actually findable.
Start with a site:yourdomain.com search, then confirm individual pages in Search Console. Search results are a useful spot check, but they are not a complete inventory of indexed pages.
You can diagnose most findability problems yourself in about fifteen minutes, without buying a tool or hiring anyone. The checks below are the same ones a technical audit starts with, and each one tells you something specific.
Run them in order. The first two catch the majority of real problems.
1. Ask Google what it has
Search for site:yourdomain.com — the operator with no space after the colon. Google can show indexed pages for that domain, but explicitly says the results may not include every indexed URL.
A missing result does not prove that a page is blocked or unindexed. Use Search Console's Page indexing report for the broader picture and URL Inspection for a specific page. Check the last crawl, the indexing status and Google's selected canonical before deciding what to fix.
2. Read the page the way a crawler does
Right-click your homepage and choose View Page Source. That is the HTML your server sent, before any JavaScript ran, and it is close to what a crawler sees first.
Use Ctrl-F to look for a sentence you know is on the page. If you can't find it in the source, your content is being assembled in the browser rather than delivered by the server. Google can usually still render it, but on a slower second pass — and most AI assistants don't run JavaScript at all, so a site built this way can be visible in Google and completely invisible to ChatGPT and Perplexity.
3. Check every page has its own title
Still in the source, find the <title> tag. Then check a second page. If both say the same thing — often just the business name — you have given Google no way to tell them apart.
Use a concise, descriptive title that distinguishes the page, with the brand once if helpful. Google has no fixed character limit: titles may be truncated to the available display width, and title links may be generated from headings and other page content. A 50–60 character target is an editorial aid, not a ranking rule.
4. Check the canonical
Search the source for rel="canonical". Every page should have one, it should be a full absolute URL, and it should point at itself.
If every page's canonical points at the homepage, every page is telling Google it's a duplicate of the homepage — and they will be treated accordingly. This is a common and completely silent failure. It's also one of the most damaging, because the site looks perfect to a human clicking around it.
5. Look for a sitemap and a robots file
Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and yourdomain.com/robots.txt directly.
Include the canonical pages you want indexed in the sitemap. It helps discovery but does not guarantee indexing; omitting a page is not an instruction to ignore it. Check that robots.txt permits crawling of important pages and names the sitemap. A Disallow rule blocks crawling, but does not reliably remove an already known URL from results. Google must be able to crawl a page to see its noindex directive.
6. Test it on a phone, on mobile data
Turn wifi off and load your site. Most local searches happen on a phone, frequently on a weak connection, and the visitor decides whether to stay in the first few seconds.
Run the same page through Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile numbers. The thresholds that matter are Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Oversized images are the most common cause of failing the first one, and it's usually the cheapest thing on this list to fix.
7. Check what a broken URL does
Type your domain followed by a nonsense path — yourdomain.com/does-not-exist.
You should get a real 'not found' page. What you must not get is your homepage, or a 'not found' message served with a success status. That second case is called a soft 404, and it means every mistyped or outdated URL pointing at your site looks to Google like a real page with nothing on it. Single-page app setups produce this by default.
Common questions
My site is indexed but doesn't rank. Is that the same problem?
No. An indexed page may still struggle to compete for a query. A page that is not indexed may have technical, discovery, duplication or quality issues. Inspect the actual reason in Search Console before assuming that more keywords or a technical change will solve it.
How long after fixing something does Google notice?
It varies. You can request a recrawl in Google Search Console for a specific URL, which often takes days rather than weeks. Site-wide changes take longer to work through. Quality assessments are continuous rather than switch-like, so a site recovering from thin content improves gradually.
Do I need paid tools for any of this?
No. Everything above uses your browser, Google Search, and PageSpeed Insights. Google Search Console is free and worth setting up regardless — it's the only place you see the queries you're actually appearing for.
If a check above came back wrong and you'd rather not work out why, send the domain over and you'll get a specific list back. There's no obligation attached, and sometimes the honest answer is that the site is fine and the problem is somewhere else.