You type your company name into Google. Competitors come up. Facebook pages come up, directories you have never heard of come up. Your site — the one you paid for, the one that looks good, the one you just opened to make sure it still works — is nowhere.
It is not a penalty, and it is usually nobody's fault. There are three reasons, and you can tell them apart yourself in a few minutes.
The ten-second check
Type this into Google, exactly like that, with your own domain:
site:example.com
That is not an ordinary search. You are asking Google to show you what it holds in its index from your site. The answer is one of three situations.
Zero results. Google has no page from you at all. Reason 1 or 2 below.
A few results, but important pages are missing. It has something, not everything. Reason 1, partially.
Everything is there. Then you are indexed, and the problem is a different one — reason 3.
Reason 1: Google receives an empty page
The most common, and the most surprising to whoever paid for the site.
Modern sites draw themselves in the browser. The server sends a nearly empty skeleton, and the text, images and menu appear afterwards, assembled by a program running inside the visitor's browser. A human sees none of this: the page is complete in a fraction of a second.
Google does not look like a human first. On its first pass it takes what the server sent. If that is an empty skeleton, that is what it stores — a page with no words. It comes back later to run the program too, but later means a second queue with its own budget, and a new site waits in it for a long time.
And the engines behind AI answers — the ones feeding ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest — mostly never come back at all. For them your site has no content, full stop.
How to check. Open your site, right-click, and choose View page source (not Inspect, which is something else). What opens is the raw text Google receives. Search it for a sentence from your page — the big headline, for instance. If it is not in there but you can see it on screen, you have reason 1.
What it costs. This is a construction problem, not a content problem, and it is solved at the publishing step — without rebuilding the site. On an ordinary brochure site it is days of work, not months. We wrote the technical half separately, for anyone who has a developer and wants to hand it straight to them.
Reason 2: you are new and nobody cites you
The second reason is not a defect. It is age.
Google decides what deserves index space largely by who cites you. A link from another site is a vote: these people are worth reading. A new domain with no votes still gets crawled — Google really does visit, sometimes hundreds of times a day — but the pages sit in a queue called "discovered, currently not indexed".
That surprises people: Google can read your site a thousand times and still keep it out of the results. It is not a contradiction. Reading is cheap. Index space is not.
How to check. If site: shows zero but your page source does contain your
text (so reason 1 is ruled out), this is it. The certain confirmation is in
Google Search Console, under Pages: the pages appear as "Discovered –
currently not indexed".
What it costs. Not money — time and real connections. Serious business directories, industry associations, partners and suppliers who list you on their own sites, local press if you have something to say. It cannot be bought: paid links are precisely the pattern Google looks for and penalises.
A new site that is technically clean, with a few genuine links, usually enters the index within weeks to a few months.
Reason 3: you are indexed, but for the wrong words
The third is the least dramatic and the most often ignored.
The site is in the index. It shows up when you search your company name. But it does not show up for the question a customer actually asks — because the site never says it in their words.
A real example from the way brochure sites tend to be written: the page says "complete solutions for your business". The customer searches "cctv installation price". The two do not share a single word.
How to check. Take three questions customers ask you on the phone, type them into Google exactly as they say them, and see who comes up. If competitors appear with pages that answer the question directly, you have reason 3.
What it costs. This is content work, not programming. One page per service that answers a real question, with the price if you are willing to write it. It is the cheapest of the three and the one that produces phone calls soonest.
What to do next
In the order worth checking:
- Page source — does it contain your text? If not, stop here. Nothing else matters until that is fixed.
site:yourdomain— does anything appear? If not, and the source was fine, it is age and missing links.- Customer questions — does any page of yours answer one, in their words? If not, that is the next thing to write.
What we deliberately left off the list: keywords in <meta keywords> (unused for
about fifteen years), submission to a hundred directories (does not help and can
hurt), and monthly "optimisation" with nothing concrete delivered.
We will check for free whether Google can see your site. It takes a few minutes, we tell you which of the three reasons is yours, and you get the answer whether or not we end up working together — including when the answer is that you do not need us.