Every week we audit a site for a prospective client and find the same problem: it's been live for 6+ months and Google has indexed 3 pages out of 30. The owner thinks Google is being slow. Usually it isn't — the site has structural issues that block indexing.
Here are the five most common causes, each with a check you can run in 60 seconds.
1. The content isn't actually in the HTML
Many template builders generate sites where the content only appears after JavaScript runs. Google can crawl that, but slowly and unreliably. AI search engines (which feed ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity) often can't read it at all.
Check: right-click your homepage → 'View page source' → search for your main heading text. If you can't find it in the raw HTML, your content is JavaScript-only.
2. The sitemap is missing or wrong
Google finds your pages partly by following links, partly by reading your `sitemap.xml`. If you don't have one (or it lists 5 pages and you have 30), Google misses pages.
Check: visit `yoursite.com/sitemap.xml`. Does it exist? Does it list every page on the site? Is the date next to each URL recent?
3. Robots.txt is blocking the crawler
One of the easiest ways to break indexing is a misconfigured `robots.txt`. Some template platforms ship with a default that blocks search bots until you 'launch' — and then forget to update.
Check: visit `yoursite.com/robots.txt`. If you see lines starting with `Disallow: /` or `User-agent: Googlebot` followed by `Disallow:`, you may be blocking yourself.
4. Every page looks the same to Google
Duplicate titles, duplicate meta descriptions, no structured data. Google can't tell what each page is for, so it picks one and ignores the rest. Often the 'home' page outranks the actual service pages.
Check: look at the browser tab title for 3 different pages on your site. If they're identical or near-identical, you have a duplication problem.
5. There's no fast way for Google to discover new pages
A new page sits unindexed for weeks if Google has no signal to revisit. Tools that ping the search engines directly (used by Bing/Yandex) and Google Search Console's URL Inspection can force a crawl within hours.
Check: sign in to Google Search Console → 'URL Inspection' → paste a page URL → see when it was last crawled. More than 4 weeks ago for a recent page? You have a discoverability problem.
Fixing this isn't more SEO services
If you have any of the issues above, paying for monthly SEO services on top of a broken foundation is throwing good money after bad. The honest path is to rebuild the foundation once, on tech that's designed to be indexed — then layer SEO on top.
That's what we do with every site we ship.