The SiteRoot team7 min read
A courier types his own business name into Google and gets nothing on the first screen. He tries again a week later, same result, and concludes he has been buried for reasons nobody is going to explain to him. The real cause, when it finally turns up, is far more boring and much more fixable: the site had been built in a way that served a blank page to anything that was not a browser, and the business name he kept typing was not written anywhere on it.
That is the general shape of it. Not showing up is almost never a punishment, because penalties are rare and are aimed at people doing things on purpose. It is nearly always one of a small number of mechanical reasons: there is nothing to show, or there is something but a crawler cannot read it, or it has not been looked at yet, or something on the site is politely asking to be left out, or you and your listing are telling two different stories, or you are checking a search you were never going to appear in. Each of those has a different fix, so the first job is working out which one you have.
First, are you sure you are not showing up
Start here, because a surprising number of these end at this step.
Search your exact business name, in quotes, on a phone that is not signed in to your Google account, in a private window. If you appear for your own name, you are indexed, and the problem is not existence. It is that you are not appearing for the searches you want, which is a completely different problem with a completely different answer.
If you do not appear even for your own name, keep reading.
Is there anything for Google to show
The blunt one. A business with no website and no Google Business Profile has given search nothing to return except whatever a directory scraped about it years ago.
A Facebook page is not a substitute, for a mechanical reason rather than an opinion: a lot of what is on it is behind a login, and what is not is a feed rather than an answer. Your hours are in a post from March. Nothing is going to surface a post from March in response to "open now".
If there is genuinely nothing, this is the whole answer and everything below is premature.
Can a crawler actually read your page
This is the one that caught the courier, and it is common enough to check before anything else.
Search engines and the tools that feed AI assistants fetch your page and read the text that comes back in that one response. Many of them do not run the scripts on the page afterwards. If your site is built so that the page arrives empty and the words are drawn in a moment later by JavaScript, then what a crawler receives is a blank shell. You look at it in Chrome and see a full website. The crawler receives nothing worth listing.
You can check this yourself. Open your site, right click and choose "View page source", then use the browser's find to search that source for a sentence you know is on the page, something distinctive like the name of a service. If the sentence is there, you are fine. If the source is a hundred lines of script and none of your words, that is your answer.
Has it just not been crawled yet
A brand new site is not instantly in the index. Days to a few weeks is normal, and there is no queue position to check.
Two things genuinely help and neither is a trick. The first is publishing a file that lists every page on your site, which search engines read to discover what exists rather than having to find every page by following links. The second is being linked to from somewhere already known, which for a small business usually means your Google Business Profile, a trade association listing, a supplier's page, or a local directory that is not junk.
Is something on the site telling Google to stay away
This one is quietly the most annoying, because the site is perfect and invisible on purpose.
There are two common culprits, and both are usually left over from the build. One is a single instruction in the page asking search engines not to list it, which developers switch on while a site is being built and occasionally forget to switch off at launch. The other is a small file at the root of your site, at yoursite.com.au/robots.txt, which tells crawlers which parts they may look at. A line in that file blocking everything is a normal thing to have on a staging site and a disaster on a live one.
You can read the robots.txt file yourself by typing that address into a browser. If you see the word Disallow followed by a single slash, that is blocking the entire site. For the other one, ask whoever built the site the direct question: is there a noindex left on any page.
Are you and your listing telling two different stories
Google is constantly trying to decide whether two mentions of a business are the same business. It does that on the details, and the details are often not the same.
The classic version: your website says Suite 4, 118 High Street. Your Google Business Profile says 118 High St, Level 1. An old directory has a mobile number you stopped using in 2023. A second Google listing exists from a previous owner and nobody ever claimed it. None of these is fatal on its own. Together they make it harder for anything to be confident which business is which, and confidence is what is being assembled here.
The fix is genuinely just clerical. Pick one form of your name, one address written one way, one phone number, and make every place you appear match it exactly. Then search your own business name and your own phone number and see what else comes back that you had forgotten about.
Are you checking a search you were never going to win
Sometimes the mechanics are all fine and the expectation is the problem.
"Plumber Melbourne" is a search a two-van operation is not going to appear in, and appearing in it would not be that useful anyway, because the person typing it could be forty kilometres away. The searches that actually bring work are longer and narrower: the suburb, the specific problem, the words a worried person types at nine at night. Those are winnable precisely because fewer people have bothered to write a proper page about them.
What to do this week, in order
- Search your exact business name in a private window, on a phone. Establish whether you exist at all.
- View the page source and find one sentence from your site in it. If it is not there, nothing else matters yet.
- Open yoursite.com.au/robots.txt and look for a Disallow line blocking everything.
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, and point it at your website.
- Make your name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear.
- Search your own phone number and see which old listings you have forgotten.
Where SiteRoot fits
Three of the causes above are build problems, so we removed them as choices rather than as tasks.
The sites we build serve their words as real text in the page, so what a crawler receives is what a person sees rather than an empty shell waiting for a script. Every publish refreshes the file that lists every page on the site, so a page you added on Thursday is not waiting to be discovered by accident. Nothing ships with a request to be left out of search, because that switch does not exist to be forgotten. And your business facts are published in one place in plain words, in a file called llms.txt that AI tools can read, alongside the same details in the pages themselves.
What we cannot do is make you appear for "plumber Melbourne", or promise a position at all. What is fixable here is the mechanical half, which is the half that is usually broken.
