A website can look perfect and still be invisible. One line in a file can tell Google to stay away, a page can be missing from Google's index without anyone noticing, and AI tools can read an empty page where a visitor sees a full one.
The seven checks below cover the problems we find most often on new clients' sites. Each one says what to open, what to look for and what a good result looks like. Our free check runs most of them for you in under a minute.
At a glance
- Is a page in Google?
- URL Inspection in Search Console, not a site: search (Google)
- Good speed
- Main content in 2.5 s, taps answered in 0.2 s, almost no layout shift (web.dev)
- ChatGPT search
- Leaves out sites that block OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI)
- Free
- Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, your browser
Check 1: Is Google listing your pages?
Many people type site:yourdomain.com into Google and count the results, which gives a rough picture at best. Google's own documentation says the site: operator does not necessarily return every page it has indexed, and points to Search Console's URL Inspection tool instead.
If you have not set up Search Console, do that first: it is free, and it is the only place Google tells you directly what it sees. Then open the Pages report to see how many pages are indexed and why the rest are not, and inspect your most important pages one by one.
Source: Google: the site: search operator.
Check 2: Is anything telling Google to stay away?
- robots.txt. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line that reads "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: *" blocks every crawler from the whole site. It is often left over from the build.
- A noindex tag. View the page source (Ctrl+U in most browsers) and search for "noindex". On a page you want in Google, it should not be there.
- One address for the site. Type your domain with and without www, and with http and https. All four should end on the same address, so Google does not split your pages between copies.
Check 3: Does each page say what it is?
- A title of its own. Every page needs a different title, with the words a buyer would type at the start. Google shortens titles that are too wide for the screen, so the end may never be seen.
- A description for Google. A sentence or two that sums up the page. Google does not always use it, but a page without one leaves the summary entirely to chance.
- One main heading. A clear heading at the top that says what the page is about, in plain words.
Check 4: Is the site fast for real visitors?
Open PageSpeed Insights and enter your homepage. The top section, when it appears, shows how fast the site was for real Chrome users over the past 28 days, and that is the speed Google uses. A page is good when its main content appears within 2.5 seconds, it answers a tap within 200 milliseconds, and its layout barely moves while loading, each measured for three visitors in four.
A new or small site often has no real-visitor data yet, because not enough people have visited. Use the lab test below it in the meantime, on the mobile setting, since most visitors in India arrive on a phone.
Check 5: Can AI tools read your site?
Look at robots.txt again, this time for AI crawlers. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot are left out of ChatGPT's search answers, while GPTBot only collects material for training its models. Google-Extended works the same way for Gemini's training, and Google says it has no effect on Search. Block the training crawlers if you want to, but do not block the search ones by accident.
Then check that your words are in the page itself. Vercel's study of AI crawlers found that those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity do not run JavaScript. If you view the page source and cannot find your own headings and paragraphs, those crawlers see an empty page.
Sources: OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers; Google: Google's common crawlers, including Google-Extended; Vercel: The rise of the AI crawler (December 2024).
Check 6: Does Google know who you are?
Structured data is a short block of code that states your business name, address, phone number and links in a form machines read without guessing. Google's Rich Results Test, or the Schema Markup Validator, shows what your pages declare. The details in it should match your Google Business Profile exactly, down to the phone number format.
Check 7: Can a visitor reach you from the homepage?
This one is not about Google, and it is the check most sites fail quietly: open your homepage on a phone and see whether you can call, start a WhatsApp chat or send an enquiry without scrolling or hunting. A ranking only matters if the visit turns into a conversation.
What a real report found
On 15 October 2026 we ran our free check on the website of a B2B advisory firm, which we are not naming. It read 26 pages, ran 46 checks and scored 79 overall, with 2 things to fix now, 9 worth improving and 26 in good shape.
The basics were sound: robots.txt let Google in, the site had one secure address and a sitemap, and all 75 images on the homepage were described. The problems sat deeper in the site, in details that are easy to miss when you only ever look at your own homepage:
| What we found | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| One page linked from the site returned "not found" | Visitors who land there leave, and links to it pass nothing on |
| No phone number or address on the homepage or in its structured data | Buyers, Google's local results and AI answers all use them to check a business is real |
| A 66-character homepage title | Google cut it off, so its last words never showed |
| Two pages sharing one title, and 3 of 25 pages with no title or description | Google cannot tell the pages apart and writes its own summaries |
| No phone, WhatsApp or email link on the homepage | An AI answer that recommends the firm cannot tell people how to reach it |
| No real-visitor speed data yet | Too few Chrome visits so far, so speed was measured with the lab test |
The AI test told the bigger story. We asked Google's AI, with Google Search, three questions a buyer would ask. It did not name the firm in any of the three answers, while six other firms were named at least twice each, and its answers drew on articles and directories, with one blogging site behind all three. A technically healthy site is where getting named by AI starts, not where it ends.
Or run all of it at once
Our free check reads your homepage and up to 25 more of your pages, then checks what Google sees, what AI tools see, how fast the site is for real visitors and how it holds together as a whole. It covers checks 2 to 7 above, explains every result in plain words, and lists what to fix first. Indexing itself, check 1, only Search Console can confirm.
When we ran it on our Delhi tarot client's site on 16 October 2026, it read 26 pages, ran 47 checks and scored 93 overall, with one thing to fix and two worth improving. A lower score is not bad news: it is a list of where to start.
What your first month with us looks like
- Week 1We take your website and start shippingWe read your Search Console and Analytics, fix whatever stops Google and AI tools reading your site, and start shipping changes. Your live dashboard is up the same week.
- Week 2We measure, then sharpenWe see what the first changes did and improve on them: pages named the way people search, pages that stop competing with each other, and a faster, clearer site that turns visits into enquiries.
- Week 3The first resultsFor the searches we started with, this is when we expect rankings to climb, and when we start checking Google's AI answers for your business.
- Week 4You see it, and we talk it throughYour DataPls dashboard shows every search, ranking and lead, updated daily. Every week we call you to go through it, and we message you the day something important changes.
Questions people ask
Is a site: search a good way to check if Google indexed my site?
Only as a rough guide. Google says the site: operator does not necessarily show every page it has indexed. Search Console's URL Inspection tool tells you for certain whether a page is indexed, and why not if it is missing.
Why does PageSpeed Insights show no real-visitor data for my site?
The real-visitor section needs enough visits from Chrome users over 28 days. New and small sites often do not have that yet. Use the lab test on the mobile setting until the real data appears.
Should I block AI crawlers in robots.txt?
Block training crawlers such as GPTBot and Google-Extended if you prefer; Google says Google-Extended has no effect on Search. Do not block OAI-SearchBot unless you want to stay out of ChatGPT's search answers, because OpenAI leaves out sites that block it.
How often should I check my website's SEO?
After every change to the site, and at least once a month in Search Console. Most of the serious problems we find, such as a noindex tag or a blocked robots.txt, arrive with a redesign or an update.