Why your business doesn't show up on Google

There are two different Googles, they fail for different reasons, and most people troubleshooting the wrong one waste months.

The map — the pin, the stars, the three businesses shown above everything else — is fed by your Google Business Profile. The blue links below it are fed by your website. A business can be perfectly visible on one and invisible on the other, and the fix for each has nothing to do with the fix for the other.

Work out which one you are missing from first. Search your business name, then search what you do plus your town, and look at which of the two you are absent from.

Your page has to survive four steps before anybody can find it, and it can die at any of them.

Google is unusually blunt about this. From its own documentation on how Search works: "Google doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, even if your page follows the Google Search Essentials." And: "Indexing isn't guaranteed; not every page that Google processes will be indexed."

A new site is not instantly anything. Google's own guidance: "It can take a few weeks for Google to notice a new site, or any changes in your existing site." Asking for a recrawl does not speed it up much — "Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks" — and repeatedly requesting indexing for the same URL does nothing at all, because "there's a quota for submitting individual URLs and requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL won't get it crawled any faster."

If your site went live last Tuesday, that is the answer. Give it a month.

Google publishes the reason, per page, in Search Console's Page indexing report. It is free, it takes ten minutes to set up, and it replaces every guess in this article with a specific sentence about your specific page. The reasons it gives, in Google's own words:

• URL marked 'noindex' — a tag on the page telling Google to stay away. In my own experience this is the one to check first on a site that launched and vanished, because a staging site is usually built with it switched on and somebody forgets to switch it off at launch. I have no survey for that, only the sites I have been handed.
• URL blocked by robots.txt — a file at the root of your site telling crawlers not to come in. Same story.
• Crawled — currently not indexed — "The page was crawled by Google but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling." Usually a thin or duplicate page. This is a content problem, not a technical one.
• Discovered — currently not indexed — Google found it and chose not to fetch it yet, often because fetching it "was expected to overload the site."
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical — you have several addresses serving the same page and Google picked a different one as the real one.
• Soft 404 — the page says "not found" to a human but returns a success code to a machine.
• Server error (5xx) or 404 — the page was broken when Google called.

Note what is not on that list: anything about keywords, or how often you post. Those are ranking questions. This list is about existing at all.

Probably, but not for the reason you have been told. Google says a sitemap "doesn't guarantee that all the items in your sitemap will be crawled and indexed," and that a site under about 500 pages, thoroughly linked internally, often does not need one.

The clause that matters for a small business is the other one: a new site with few links pointing at it is exactly the case where a sitemap helps, because there is nothing else for Google to follow. Every site I build publishes one at /sitemap.xml automatically.

This is a completely separate system, and for a local business it is usually the one that pays.

Google publishes its local ranking factors, and there are three.

Relevance — "how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for." This is mostly your primary category. Pick the most specific true one.

Distance — "how far each business is from the customer who's searching." You cannot do anything about this, and it is the reason a competitor two miles closer outranks you for half the town.

Prominence — "how well-known a business is." Google names its inputs directly: "how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking."

And the sentence to remember when somebody cold-calls you about guaranteed Google placement: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

An unverified profile is a profile that does not really exist. Google: "To edit your business info on Google, such as business name or business hours, and interact with customers, you need to verify your business." Google's own wait is "Verification reviews take up to 5 business days. On rare occasions, reviews may take longer." — that is the check on your business, not the customer reviews further down this page.

There is a step-by-step guide to creating and verifying a profile in this library, including what the video verification actually wants from you.

If customers do not come to your address, Google's rule is explicit: "If you're a service-area business, you should hide your business address from customers" and "If you don't serve customers at your business address, remove your address from your Business Profile." You may list up to 20 service areas, and the whole area "shouldn't be more than about 2 hours of driving time" from your base.

Inventing an address or using a mailbox is the fastest route to a suspension.

"Vancouver Plumber | Emergency Plumbing Near Me | Joe's Plumbing" is not a clever trick, it is a policy violation. Google requires that your name "reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers," and bans taglines, store codes, phone numbers, URLs, service descriptions and location details inside it.

The consequence, in Google's words: "Including unnecessary information in your business name isn't permitted, and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile."

The same goes for the newer stuff getting sold to small businesses — fifty near-identical "plumber in [town]" pages generated in an afternoon. Google's spam policies now name scaled content abuse as a category of its own.

Asking customers for reviews is fine and encouraged. Google allows you to "solicit or encourage the posting of content that does represent a genuine experience, without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review."

Two things are prohibited, both common:

• Incentives. Offering "payment, discounts, free goods and/or services — in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review."
• Review gating. Google's exact words: "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers." That is the survey-first funnel that sends four-and-five-star customers to Google and everyone else to a private complaints form. It is sold constantly. It is against the rules.

Ask everyone, incentivise nobody. And keep asking, because recency shows: in BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers, 74% seek reviews written in the last three months. That is what they go looking for, not a rule they enforce — the same survey has 32% looking for reviews from the last two weeks.

Worth fixing, and rarely the reason you are invisible. Google's current page experience documentation is careful about this: "There is no single signal," and "Google Search always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par. But for many queries, there is lots of helpful content available. Having a great page experience can contribute to success in Search, in such cases."

In other words, speed breaks ties. It does not beat relevance. Here are the thresholds Google publishes, measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads:

Note that INP replaced FID as a Core Web Vital on 12 March 2024, so any advice you are reading about First Input Delay is at least two years stale.

Not a separate site, not an afterthought — the one Google actually reads. "Google uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking." If your site is only really usable on a laptop, that is the version nobody is indexing.

The machine-readable summary of your business in the page's code: name, address, phone, hours, price range. It is how you end up in a knowledge panel rather than a plain blue link. Google supports a LocalBusiness type and asks you to use the most specific sub-type that fits.

One warning, because small businesses get manual actions for it regularly: do not mark up your own star ratings on your own site unless they are real reviews genuinely collected and shown on that page. Google's policies ban marking up "irrelevant or misleading content, such as fake reviews."

1. Is the profile verified, and is the address setting right? Ten minutes, and it is the whole ballgame for local searches.
2. Is the primary category the most specific true one?
3. Set up Search Console and read the Page indexing report. It names your actual problem instead of a generic one.
4. Check for a stray noindex or a blocking robots.txt. Most common launch mistake there is.
5. Has it been less than a month? Then wait.
6. Ask every customer for a review, every time. Not just the happy ones.
7. Then, and only then, worry about speed, schema and content.

Steps one, two and six are yours — nobody should be charging you for them, and the guides in this library walk through each one. Steps three, four and seven are the technical end, and they are built into every site I put live: the sitemap, the structured data, the Search Console property, the speed work and the mobile version, all set up at launch rather than sold as an extra afterwards. If your current site is failing at that end and nobody can tell you why, tell me what you searched for and I will tell you which of the seven it is.

Almost every article on this subject cites the same handful of figures: 76% of people who search nearby visit a business within a day, 46% of searches have local intent, businesses with photos get 42% more direction requests.

I have left all of them out. The first two come from Google research published around 2016 and an offhand remark at a 2018 event, and the pages that hosted them now redirect to a page with no statistics on it at all. The photo figure is attributed to Google everywhere and is not on Google's photos help page today. I could not link you to a live source for any of them, so they are not here.

Everything above is quoted from a page you can open right now.