Why your new site isn't indexed yet
Five things that genuinely block indexing, the submission protocol most people have never heard of, and a realistic timeline for a new domain.
A new domain typically takes one to four weeks for its first pages to appear in Google, and longer to be indexed in full. Before assuming something is broken, it is worth ruling out the handful of things that genuinely block indexing — and then using the one submission route most people have never heard of.
Five things that actually block indexing
Work through these before concluding it is a waiting game. Each takes under a minute and each is a real, common cause.
| Check | What kills you | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| robots.txt | Disallow: / left over from staging | Load yoursite.com/robots.txt and read it |
| noindex | A meta robots noindex shipped to production | Meta tag checker |
| X-Robots-Tag | A noindex header set at the CDN, invisible in the HTML | Check response headers |
| Canonical | Every page pointing at the homepage | Meta tag checker |
| Rendering | Content assembled by JavaScript the crawler never runs | What AI crawlers see |
A staging-era robots.txt is the most common single cause, and the most embarrassing, because the site works perfectly for every human who visits it. The noindex header is the nastiest, because it does not appear anywhere in your HTML — you have to look at the response headers to find it.
The submission route nobody mentions
Google gets all the attention, and Google has exactly one submission mechanism: Search Console. Verify the property, submit the sitemap, request indexing on individual URLs. There is no faster path and no API that changes this.
Bing is different, and this is the part worth knowing. Bing supports IndexNow, an open protocol that lets you push URLs directly rather than wait to be crawled. You host a key file at your domain root, POST a JSON body listing your URLs, and Bing, Yandex and Seznam all receive the same submission.
{
"host": "yoursite.com",
"key": "your-key",
"keyLocation": "https://yoursite.com/your-key.txt",
"urlList": [
"https://yoursite.com/",
"https://yoursite.com/pricing"
]
}Up to 10,000 URLs go in a single request. Do not resubmit unchanged URLs repeatedly — the endpoint returns a 422 for that, and it is treated as spam behaviour.
What actually speeds Google up
- 1Verify Search Console and submit the sitemap. This is the gate in front of every other Google action, and an unverified property has no submission route at all.
- 2Request indexing on your five most important URLs. Not all of them — the quota is small and it is better spent on pages that matter.
- 3Make every page reachable within two clicks. Discovery follows links. A page reachable only from the sitemap gets crawled once and reconsidered rarely; run the internal link checker to find the ones that are stranded.
- 4Get one external link. A single link from any indexed site gives crawlers a route in that does not depend on your sitemap being read. This is the step people skip and it is the one that most reliably works.
- 5Publish something worth returning for. Crawl frequency responds to change. A site that never updates gets visited on a schedule that reflects that.
A realistic timeline
| When | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Days 1–7 | Bing picks up an IndexNow submission. Homepage appears in Google if you have any external link at all. |
| Weeks 1–3 | Google indexes the bulk of a small site, assuming Search Console is verified and the sitemap submitted. |
| Weeks 4–8 | Low-competition pages — glossaries, tools, definitions — start ranking. Commercial pages usually do not yet. |
| Months 2–4 | AI engines begin citing pages, but only where an indexed page or a third-party mention exists to cite. |
If you are inside those windows and the five checks above came back clean, nothing is wrong. New domains are not penalised; they simply have no crawl history, no links and no track record, and those are accumulated rather than configured.
Frequently asked questions
- How long does Google take to index a new site?
- Typically one to four weeks for the first pages, and longer for full coverage. The single biggest variable is whether any external site links to you — a domain with one inbound link from an indexed page is usually found within days, while one with none can wait weeks for its sitemap to be picked up.
- Does submitting a sitemap guarantee indexing?
- No. A sitemap tells an engine a URL exists; it does not argue that the URL is worth having. Pages that appear only in a sitemap, with no internal or external links, are routinely discovered and then not indexed. Discovery and inclusion are separate decisions.
- Is there an IndexNow equivalent for Google?
- No. Google does not participate in IndexNow and has said it has no plans to. Search Console remains the only submission route, which is why verifying it is the first thing to do on any new domain.
- Why is only my homepage indexed?
- Usually one of two things: the site is simply young and Google has started with the page it found first, or the other pages have no internal links pointing at them and look unimportant. Check the second with the internal link checker before assuming the first.
- Does domain age itself hurt my rankings?
- Age is not a ranking factor. What correlates with it is everything age allows to accumulate: links, content, crawl history, mentions elsewhere. A new domain is not penalised, it is just short on evidence. You can check any domain's real registration date with our domain age checker.
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