First: is it actually missing, or just ranking badly?
These are different problems with different fixes, and it's worth separating them before you change anything. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If results appear, your site is indexed and you have a ranking problem. If nothing appears, it isn't indexed and you have a technical problem.
Everything below addresses the second case, in the order that finds the cause fastest.
1. Has Google had time to find you?
New sites aren't indexed instantly. Discovery typically takes days, and full indexing can take one to four weeks — longer for a brand-new domain with no inbound links, because Google has no signal that the site exists.
Speed it up by setting up Google Search Console, verifying ownership, and submitting your sitemap. Then use URL Inspection on your most important pages and click "Request indexing". There's a daily quota of roughly ten, so spend it on pages that matter.
2. Is robots.txt blocking the crawler?
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, that single line blocks your entire site from being crawled. It's the correct setting for a staging environment and catastrophic on production — and deploying a staging robots.txt to live is one of the most common ways sites vanish from search.
An important subtlety: robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. A blocked page can still appear as a bare URL if other sites link to it. Our robots.txt generator produces a correct file, and Search Console's robots.txt report shows exactly how Googlebot reads yours.
3. Is there a noindex tag?
This is the most common cause of all, and the most invisible — the page looks perfect to a human visitor. View your page source and search for noindex. If you find <meta name="robots" content="noindex">, that tag is explicitly telling search engines to exclude the page.
It usually arrives one of two ways: a CMS setting like WordPress's "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" checkbox, which is easy to enable during development and forget; or a staging configuration promoted to production. Check both the HTML and your server's X-Robots-Tag header, since the same directive can be sent as a header.
4. Are your canonical tags pointing elsewhere?
A canonical tag tells Google which version of a page is authoritative. If every page on your site carries a canonical pointing at your homepage — a surprisingly common template bug — you're instructing Google to ignore all of them and index only the homepage.
Each page's canonical should normally point to itself. Check a few pages and confirm the URL in the tag matches the page you're on.
5. Can Google actually render your content?
If your content is injected by JavaScript after page load, Google may index an empty shell. Googlebot does execute JavaScript, but rendering is queued separately from crawling and can lag by days — and any script error means it sees nothing.
Test with Search Console's URL Inspection tool: use "Test live URL", then view the rendered HTML. If your headings and body copy aren't there, that's your answer. Server-side rendering or static generation removes the problem entirely.
6. Is the content substantial enough to index?
Google doesn't index everything it crawls. Pages that are very thin, near-duplicates of other pages, or auto-generated with little unique value often sit in Search Console's "Discovered – currently not indexed" or "Crawled – currently not indexed" state.
That status is Google telling you the page didn't clear its quality bar. The fix isn't technical — it's giving the page a genuine reason to exist: content that answers something specific, better than the pages already ranking.
7. Technical basics worth confirming
Make sure your pages return a 200 status code (not 404 or 5xx), that HTTPS works and redirects correctly, and that your site is reachable at one canonical hostname — pick www or non-www and 301 everything else to it. Confirm your sitemap lists real, indexable URLs and is submitted in Search Console.
Finally, check for a manual action in Search Console under Security & Manual Actions. It's rare, but if Google has penalised your site, nothing else you do will help until it's resolved.
The realistic timeline
Once you've fixed the cause, indexing still takes time — days for a small site with requested indexing, several weeks for a large one. Resist the urge to keep changing things while you wait; you'll lose track of which change fixed what. Make the fix, request indexing, and check back in a week.