Not indexed, or indexed and not ranking? Establish that first

Search for why a new website is not showing up on Google and you get eight articles that all list the same six causes in roughly the same order: missing redirects, a noindex tag left over from staging, thinned content, missing metadata, broken internal links, slow pages. They are not wrong. They are answering two entirely different questions at the same time, and only one of them is yours.

Not being in Google at all is a technical fault. It is binary, it has a cause you can find in an afternoon, and it is usually fixed the same week. Being in Google and not being found is a competitive position. It has no single cause, it is not a bug, and it takes months. Spending a week auditing redirects when your pages were indexed all along is the most common way this goes wrong.

Step one, and it is one search

site:yourdomain.com

Pages listed        -> you are INDEXED. Skip to the second half.
Nothing at all      -> you are NOT INDEXED. Continue below.
Homepage only       -> partial. Treat as not indexed and find out
                       what is blocking the rest.

The order matters more than the list. Each step below can make every step after it irrelevant, so stop at the first one that fails rather than working through all of them.

# 1. Is the page telling Google to stay away?
#    This is first because nothing else matters if it says noindex.
curl -s https://example.com/some-page \
  | grep -oE '<meta name="robots"[^>]*>'

# 2. Is the whole site disallowed?
curl -s https://example.com/robots.txt

# 3. Does the sitemap exist, and is the page actually in it?
curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -c "<loc>"
curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep "some-page"

# 4. Does the URL resolve, or bounce through a redirect chain?
curl -sI -L -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{num_redirects} %{url_effective}\n' \
  https://example.com/some-page

# 5. Does the canonical point at itself, or at something else?
curl -s https://example.com/some-page \
  | grep -oE '<link rel="canonical"[^>]*>'

A live, correct, invisible page: how it happens

Step one is first because a page can be entirely correct and still uncrawlable, and nothing about the page tells you. It happened on this site on 2 September 2026, which is recent enough to still be embarrassing.

Four posts were published and given dates two days in the future. The blog gates publication on that date, deliberately, so a post can be written ahead and go live on its own. The gate did exactly what it was built to do: all four rendered noindex, follow and none appeared in the sitemap. The URLs worked. The pages looked finished. They were readable, shareable and indexable by nothing, and the only way to see it was to read the robots meta.

Nothing on a noindexed page looks wrong. It renders, it is styled, it shares correctly. The fault lives in a tag nobody reads and a sitemap nobody opens.

The usual version of this is a staging noindex that survived the launch, and it is worth stressing how ordinary that is. It is not carelessness. Every competent build hides the staging site from search, and the tag that does it looks identical to the tag that should have been removed.

If you are indexed: it is probably not broken

This is where most people actually are, and where most of the advice they find does not apply. If site: returns your pages, Google can see them. Your problem is that other pages are a better answer, and that is not a fault to fix, it is a gap to close.

• Check what you actually rank for before assuming you rank for nothing. Search Console's performance report will show impressions on queries you never targeted, and those are usually the honest starting point.
• Look at who holds the results you want. If the first page is the vendor whose product you named, or five competitors who have each been publishing for a decade, the term is not available to you and no amount of on-page work changes that.
• Narrow until the results stop being owned. A question with a specific, checkable answer is winnable by a new site in a way that a category term never is.

The third possibility nobody wants

Your site is fine and it is new. A domain that launched a fortnight ago is neither broken nor outranked; it has not been assessed yet. Indexation on a new domain commonly takes days to weeks, and ranking movement takes considerably longer. There is no technical work that substitutes for that, and the articles implying otherwise are selling the implication.

What you can do meanwhile is remove every reason not to index you, which is the five commands above, and submit the sitemap. Then publish things worth citing. If the cause turns out to be a migration rather than a launch, the redirect side is covered in what a WordPress to Webflow migration actually involves. If it turns out to be speed, that is why a Webflow site is slow. And if it is the platform's own ceilings, Webflow's real limits.

The one thing worth doing before any of that is the site: search. Two seconds, and it tells you which half of the internet's advice on this subject was written for somebody else.