Why your new website isn’t on Google yet, and what the first 90 days look like

The site is live, the launch post is out, and you search for your company on Google. Nothing shows up, or only the old site. It’s frustrating, but it’s normal. A new website goes through three stages before it brings in steady visitors: Google finds it, then shows it, then people click it. Each stage takes time.

Weeks 1–2: Google finds and indexes your pages

Before a page can appear in results, Google has to crawl it and add it to its index. Google says this can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for a new site. You can help it along:

• Verify the site in Google Search Console.
• Submit your XML sitemap, so Google has a full list of your pages.
• Use URL Inspection on your most important pages and press “Request indexing”.
• Link to the new site from your Google Business Profile and social accounts.

The home page is usually indexed first, then the pages it links to. When we relaunched this site in October, the home page came first, and the contact page and Indonesian home page followed within days.

Weeks 2–6: impressions before clicks

Next, your pages start to appear in results, often far down at first. Search Console counts these as impressions. Searches for your brand name usually bring the first clicks. Pages for broader topics show up on page five, eight or ten, where almost nobody clicks yet.

This is where many people misread the numbers. As new pages start appearing for harder searches, your average position gets worse, even though nothing has gone wrong. More impressions with a lower average usually means Google is testing you for more searches.

Impressions come before clicks. Watch which searches you appear for, not just the traffic.

Months 2–3: climbing, with help

Pages that answer a search well slowly move up as Google gathers signals. You can speed this up:

• Link new articles from related pages on your own site, not only from the blog list.
• Improve pages that already get impressions: a clearer title, a better answer, a missing section.
• Earn a few real links from partners, suppliers, associations or local press.
• Keep publishing on the topics your customers ask about, at a pace you can keep up.

What to check in Search Console each week

When a slow start is a real problem

Most slow starts fix themselves. These don’t, so check for them if nothing is indexed after a few weeks:

• A “noindex” setting left on from the staging site, or a robots.txt file that blocks crawling.
• Old addresses that return “not found” instead of redirecting to the new pages.
• Many pages marked “Crawled – currently not indexed”. That often means they are too thin or too similar to each other.
• Language versions of the same page without hreflang tags, so Google treats them as duplicates.
• A sitemap that lists old or redirected addresses.

Launching soon? Start with the SEO foundations a new site should launch with, and if you’re replacing an old site, read moving your old website without losing traffic. If you want help after launch, Digital growth is where we do this work every week.