A new site can take days or weeks to appear
Google says crawling (when its program visits your pages) can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and asking for a visit does not guarantee that a page will be included in results (Google Search Central: Ask Google to recrawl your URLs).
To see what Google knows about one page, use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, a free tool where you prove you own the site.
To see what search engines read on your home page, run Heedza's Search check in the free scan.
Check that nothing tells Google to stay away
Two things can keep a page out of Google:
- A noindex tag, a line in the page's code that asks search engines not to list the page. Google says it drops a page entirely from results once it sees this tag (Google Search Central: noindex).
- A robots.txt file that blocks the page. Google says that if a page is blocked there, it can never see a noindex tag on it.
An AI tool sometimes adds a noindex tag while you are building. Ask it to remove the tag from pages you want people to find. A sitemap is a file that lists your pages, and it helps Google find them.
The small icon in search results can take weeks too
Google says that after you change your site's icon (the favicon), crawling your home page again can take several days to several weeks, and that an icon is not guaranteed to appear (Google Search Central: favicons).
A broken or old link preview image
When you share a link, the preview picture comes from an og:image tag in the page's code (Open Graph protocol). For Facebook and Messenger:
- Meta's documentation says the image should be at least 200 by 200 pixels, recommends 1200 by 630 pixels or larger, and says to keep the shape close to 1.91 to 1 so the whole image shows without cropping (Meta: Images in link shares).
- Facebook keeps each image by its address. If you replace the picture, give the new picture a new file name or address, and keep the old file available (Meta: Images in link shares).
- Facebook updates a link's details by itself about every 30 days. You can ask it to look again with Meta's Sharing Debugger (you need to log in to Facebook). Posts already shared keep the old preview (Meta: change metadata for an existing link).
A fix to paste into your AI tool
This asks for the settings above. Check the result on your live address afterwards:
Fix how my live site https://yourdomain.com appears in Google and in link previews. Do not change anything else.
1. Give the home page a clear title and a description of one or two sentences.
2. Add og:title, og:description, og:url and og:image tags. The og:image must be the full https address of a 1200 by 630 pixel image. Add twitter:card set to summary_large_image.
3. Use a new file name for the image, so Facebook does not show an old one.
4. Remove any noindex tag from pages I want people to find, and check that robots.txt does not block the whole site.
5. Add a sitemap.xml and list its address in robots.txt.
6. Tell me which files you changed and why.What the free scan checks, and what it cannot see
The Search check in the free scan runs 12 checks on your home page: title and description, social previews (the og:image and twitter:card tags), canonical address, robots.txt and sitemap, an accidental noindex, headings, image descriptions, a sample of broken links, structured data, page weight, whether the text is in the page without JavaScript, and the language and mobile settings. Each problem comes with a fix to paste into your AI tool.
It checks your home page only. It does not tell you whether Google has listed your site, it does not submit your site to search engines, and it does not show how Facebook displays your link.
Your next step: run the free scan
Use the free scan at the bottom of this page. Paste your live web address. It opens your home page, looks for secret keys in its code, checks a few private files and looks at what search engines see. No account is needed.