Can Google read your website? Five checks without a developer

Why start here

Every other piece of advice about getting found, from better wording to more reviews, assumes one thing: that Google can reach your pages, is allowed to keep them, and can read what they say. If any of those fails, the rest doesn’t matter for that page.

It matters for AI answers too. Google says a page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear as a link in its AI Overviews and AI Mode. Our first guide, What does ChatGPT say about your business?, covers the other AI tools.

You need a browser, your web address and about 20 minutes. Nothing to install, and no code to write.

1. Is your site in Google at all?

Go to Google and search for site:yourwebsite.com, with your own address and no space after the colon. Google’s SEO Starter Guide puts it simply: if you see results pointing to your site, you’re in the index.

Two cautions from Google’s documentation. The list isn’t always complete, so a page that’s missing from it isn’t proof the page isn’t indexed. And if an important page is missing, the way to confirm is the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, covered below.

2. Are search crawlers allowed in?

Every website can have a small text file at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt that tells automated visitors which pages they may crawl. One wrong line, such as Disallow: / under User-agent: *, tells every crawler to stay out of the whole site.

Open your file in a browser, copy everything, and paste it into the reader below. It applies Google’s published rules: the most specific matching group applies, the longest matching rule wins, and Allow wins a tie.

Three facts worth knowing, all from Google:

• No file is fine. If robots.txt returns “not found”, Google treats the site as having no crawl restrictions.
• It isn’t a privacy tool. robots.txt manages crawling. A blocked page can still be indexed, without a description, if other pages link to it.
• Not every crawler obeys it. Googlebot and other respectable crawlers do; others might not.

3. Is any page told to stay out?

A page can carry a noindex rule that tells Google to drop it from results. That’s useful for a thank-you page. On your homepage or a service page it’s a quiet disaster.

1. Open the page’s source. In Chrome, press Ctrl+U on Windows or Option+Command+U on a Mac. A new tab shows the page’s code.

2. Search it for “noindex”. Press Ctrl+F or Command+F. If you find <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> on a page you want found, that’s the problem.

3. Check your website builder’s settings. Many builders have a switch that hides a site from search engines, often used while a site is under construction. Make sure it’s off.

The same rule can also be sent as an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, which doesn’t appear in the page source. Search Console catches both: its Page indexing report lists pages as “URL marked ‘noindex’”. Note that Google can only see a noindex rule on a page it’s allowed to crawl, which is another reason check 2 comes first.

4. Can Google see your words?

Stay in the page source from check 3 and search for two things: your phone number, and a sentence from your main service description.

Found bothYour words are in the page itself

Any crawler that reads the page can read them, whether or not it runs JavaScript. This is the best case.

Found neitherYour words are added by JavaScript

Google can run JavaScript: it crawls, renders, then indexes. Not every crawler can, though. Use Search Console’s URL Inspection live test to see exactly what Google renders.

Two more things to look at while you’re here:

• Facts in pictures. If your phone number, hours or prices only appear inside an image, also write them as text on the page. Text can be read, quoted and tapped; a picture of a phone number can’t be tapped.
• Your phone version. Google says it uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. Open your site on a phone and make sure everything important on the desktop version is there too.

5. Does every page say what it is?

Look at the titles you saw in check 1. Google builds those from each page’s <title> element and other headings. Google’s guidance for titles:

• Every page has one. Google asks for a title on every page of your site.
• Each one is different. Five pages all titled with just your business name tell Google nothing about which page answers which question.
• Descriptive and concise. Say what the page is about, then your business name.
• No keyword stuffing. Google says it can make results look spammy, to Google and to people.

Google may still rewrite a title it thinks doesn’t match the page. The page’s meta description, a one- or two-sentence summary, is sometimes used as the text under the title.

The full picture: Search Console

The five checks above find the common problems. Google Search Console (opens in a new tab) is free and shows what Google itself recorded. Verify your site once, submit your sitemap, then use two reports:

Page indexing reportWhich pages are in, and why others aren’t

Every page not indexed has a reason, such as “URL marked ‘noindex’”, “URL blocked by robots.txt” or “Crawled – currently not indexed”. Google says not to expect every URL to be indexed. What matters is that your key pages are.

URL InspectionOne page, in detail

Shows whether Google indexed a page and why, and a live test shows what Google renders today. “URL is on Google” means the page is eligible to appear, not that it’s guaranteed to.

We ran it on ourselves

On October 9, 2026 we ran checks 2 to 5 on six pages of primebridgeenterprises.com: the homepage, Services, About, Contact, Guides and our first guide.

• Check 2: our robots.txt allows every crawler, blocks only two private paths (/api/ and /paper-trail/get/) and lists our sitemap.
• Check 3: none of the six pages had a noindex rule, in the page or in its headers.
• Check 4: our phone number and page text were in the page source on all six, from about 460 words on the shortest page to about 2,800 on the homepage.
• Check 5: each page has its own title, such as “Contact PrimeBridge Enterprises | El Paso, Texas”.

Our site is verified in Search Console. Search Console showed our sitemap as successfully processed at the October 7 recheck. What these checks can’t tell us is whether Google will show our pages for a given search. Being readable is the starting line, not the finish.