Your site is deployed and Google does not know it exists
Publishing a site does not tell any search engine it exists. A new domain with no inbound links can sit unfound indefinitely. Verify the site in Google Search Console, submit your sitemap there, and check the Pages report. Until then there is no indexing path, and waiting will not create one.
Live sites Google had never heard of
On one network, Search Console setup sat open for two weeks across five live sites. Every one of them had been deployed, verified as working, and submitted for ad network approval while having no route into Google at all. Searching the exact domain name returned nothing, which was not slowness: publishing to a host makes a site reachable and notifies no search engine, and a brand new domain with no inbound links gives Google nothing to follow.
Ad approval on an unindexed site earns exactly nothing, so the two weeks bought no traffic and no revenue. The fix was the ordinary list: register and verify the property, submit the sitemap and check the status reads Success with a page count that matches expectations, confirm no stray Disallow: / survived from staging, and use URL Inspection on two or three important pages.
The site is live. It has been live for weeks. Searching for its exact domain name returns nothing, and none of the pages appear for anything.
This is not slowness. In most cases there is simply no path by which Google would ever find out the site exists.
Deploying is not announcing
Publishing to a host makes a site reachable. It does not notify any search engine. Google finds new sites by following links from pages it already crawls, and a brand new domain with no inbound links has none. It can sit there indefinitely.
The minimum that actually creates an indexing path
- Register the site in Google Search Console and verify it. Nothing else on this list substitutes for it.
- Submit your sitemap at Indexing, Sitemaps. Enter the full URL, for example
https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. You want the status to read Success with a page count that matches what you expect. - Confirm robots.txt is not blocking you. A stray
Disallow: /left over from staging will quietly undo everything else. - Use URL Inspection on two or three important pages and request indexing to prime the process.
What does not work
IndexNow does not reach Google. It is genuinely useful, it needs no account, and Bing and Yandex both consume it. Google does not participate. If IndexNow is your only submission route, your Google indexing path is still zero. Use it in addition to Search Console, never instead of it.
Meta keywords do nothing. They have been ignored for well over a decade.
Waiting is not a strategy when there is no route in. Time only helps once a path exists.
Realistic expectations once it is set up
Verification is immediate. Sitemap processing usually happens within a day or two. Initial indexing of a small site typically lands within one to two weeks. Ranking for anything competitive takes considerably longer and is a separate problem from being indexed at all.
Do this the day you launch, not later. On one network, Search Console setup sat open for two weeks across five live sites. Every one of them had been deployed, verified as working, and submitted for ad network approval while having no route into Google at all. Ad approval on an unindexed site earns exactly nothing.
Read the Pages report properly, because the three states need opposite responses
Search Console's Indexing, Pages report is the diagnostic instrument here, and its value is entirely in the reason strings. Treating "not indexed" as one condition is what keeps people stuck.
Discovered, currently not indexed. Google knows the URL exists and has chosen not to spend crawl budget on it yet. This is the normal state for a new site with no authority, and the response is patience plus anything that raises the site's perceived value: more substantial pages, internal links, and any genuine external link.
Crawled, currently not indexed. Different and more informative. Google fetched the page, read it, and decided not to index it. That is a judgement about the content, not a queue position. Requesting indexing again will not change it. Thin pages, near-duplicate pages, and pages that are mostly generated output land here.
Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical. Your signals are contradicting each other, usually between the canonical tag, the sitemap, and your internal links. This is a fixable technical problem rather than a content one.
Page with redirect and Alternate page with proper canonical tag are usually not problems at all. Your http URLs redirecting to https is correct behaviour appearing in a report, not a defect to chase.
Crawled is not indexed, and indexed is not ranking
Three separate things, and conflating them causes people to work on the wrong one.
Crawling means a bot fetched the page. Indexing means it was stored and is eligible to appear. Ranking means it actually appears for something people search. A site can be fully crawled and fully indexed and get zero traffic, and that is not an indexing problem at all. It is a demand problem or a competition problem, and no amount of sitemap work will touch it.
The check that distinguishes them: search for a distinctive exact phrase from one of your pages, in quotes. If your page comes back, it is indexed and the issue is ranking. If nothing comes back, it is not indexed and you are in the right guide.
Do that rather than searching your domain name, which is unreliable for a new site and tells you less.
Internal links are the part people skip
A sitemap tells a crawler that a URL exists. Internal links tell it which URLs matter and give it a route to them that does not depend on a file being parsed.
An orphan page, one that no other page on your site links to, is the single most common reason a page sits in "Discovered" indefinitely. It happens naturally when pages are created from a template and added to the sitemap by a script, without anyone adding them to a navigation or a related-links block.
The fix is unglamorous and works: every page should be reachable from the homepage in two clicks or fewer, and every page should link out to two or three genuinely related pages. That also gives a reader somewhere to go, which is the actual reason to do it.
Check for orphans by extracting every internal href on the site and comparing that set against your sitemap. Anything in the sitemap that nothing links to is an orphan.
The sitemap details that matter and the ones that do not
Do not spend time on <priority> or <changefreq>. Google has said plainly that it ignores both, and every hour spent tuning them is wasted.
<lastmod> does get used, but only if it is honest. A sitemap that stamps today's date on every URL at every build is telling the crawler nothing, and once that pattern is detected the field stops being trusted for your site. Set it from the actual modification time of the content, or leave it out.
The things that genuinely matter are boring: every URL returns 200, every URL is the canonical form, every URL is on the hostname the property covers, and the file is under the limits of 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed.
Expect Bing and Google to behave completely differently
This is the thing that most distorts a new site owner's read of their own first three months.
Bing indexes new domains markedly faster than Google does and starts sending traffic sooner. Google is conservative with sites that have no history and no inbound links, and that conservatism is not a signal that anything is wrong.
On one network of small utility sites, measured across 28 days, roughly 92 percent of organic traffic came from the Bing family, meaning Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo, and about 6 percent came from Google. That ratio does not persist, and it is not an argument for ignoring Google. It is an argument for setting up both, measuring both, and not concluding your site is broken because one of them has not caught up.
Pages Google found and chose not to index
Creating an indexing path gets pages discovered, and it does nothing about the two states that follow. Pages sitting in "Crawled, currently not indexed" were fetched and judged, so requesting indexing again will not move them and thin, near-duplicate or mostly generated pages stay where they are. Pages in "Discovered, currently not indexed" often need an internal link rather than another submission, because a sitemap says a URL exists while nothing on the site says it matters. A sitemap will also not touch ranking, which is a separate problem, and "Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical" is a signals conflict between your canonical tag, sitemap and internal links that has to be fixed there.
Questions about a site missing from Google
Why is my new site not showing up in Google at all?
In most cases there is no path by which Google would find out it exists. Google finds new sites by following links from pages it already crawls, and a new domain with no inbound links has none, so it can sit there indefinitely until you register it in Search Console and submit a sitemap.
Does IndexNow submit my pages to Google?
No. Bing and Yandex both consume IndexNow and Google does not participate, so if IndexNow is your only submission route your Google indexing path is still zero. Use it in addition to Search Console, never instead of it.
How long should indexing take once everything is set up?
Verification is immediate, sitemap processing usually happens within a day or two, and initial indexing of a small site typically lands within one to two weeks. Ranking for anything competitive takes considerably longer and is a separate problem.
What is the difference between "Discovered, currently not indexed" and "Crawled, currently not indexed"?
Discovered means Google knows the URL exists and has not spent crawl budget on it yet, which is normal for a new site. Crawled means Google fetched the page, read it, and decided not to index it, which is a judgement about the content that re-requesting indexing will not change.
How do I tell whether a page is indexed or just not ranking?
Search for a distinctive exact phrase from the page, in quotes. If the page comes back it is indexed and the issue is ranking; if nothing comes back it is not indexed. Searching your domain name is unreliable for a new site and tells you less.
Do <code><priority></code> and <code><changefreq></code> in my sitemap help?
No, Google has said plainly that it ignores both. <lastmod> is used, but only if it is honest, so set it from the actual modification time of the content or leave it out.