Is Google Seeing Your Website?

Five months. That is how long my sitemap was broken before I noticed.

I had deactivated a plugin during a routine website update. What I did not realise was that the plugin generated my sitemap. The file Google uses to know which pages exist on a website. It went from working to returning a 404 error. And Google quietly stopped indexing my new pages.

For five months I was writing blog posts, following advice, doing everything I was supposed to do. None of it was being read. I was beavering away generating nothing other than unread blogs. Google did not know those pages existed.

I only found out by accident.

That experience is what made me build the free Site Visibility Check. If it happened to me, and I do this for a living, it is happening to business owners who have never heard the word “sitemap” in their lives.

SEO is a rabbit warren

Every article you read sends you down another tunnel. Technical SEO. On-page SEO. Off-page SEO. Core Web Vitals. Schema markup. Backlink profiles. Most owners read two paragraphs, feel overwhelmed, and close the tab.

I see two situations constantly.

First, the owner who built their own website. They are completely unaware of how websites get noticed by search engines, let alone ranked. Nobody told them there was a checklist.

Second, the owner who paid an agency or a web designer. The site looks good. But nobody explained the steps needed to get it seen by Google. The designer moved on to the next job and the owner assumed everything was taken care of.

In both cases, the owner has no idea whether Google can see their site. And they have no idea how to check.

I looked for a free tool that answered the basics. Can Google see my pages? Does my site load on mobile? Is my sitemap working? I could not find one simple enough for a business owner to use without a marketing degree. So I built one.

What the check finds most often

When I run the Site Visibility Check on a typical small business website, three things come up more than anything else.

The sitemap has not been submitted to Google. Many owners do not know what a sitemap is, let alone that it needs submitting. A sitemap is simply a list of all the pages on your website, formatted so Google can read it. Without one, Google has to guess which pages exist. The good news: once you know how, submitting one is straightforward.

Page structure problems. Multiple H1 tags on a single page. Missing meta descriptions. These are the things search engines read to understand what your page is about. “What is that?” is the usual response when I explain it to an owner. Fair enough. But once you see the problem, the fix is usually a few clicks in your website editor.

Page speed, almost always caused by images. A photograph uploaded straight from a phone can be 5MB. That single image can double the time your page takes to load. Google notices. So does the person waiting for your page to appear on their phone while standing outside your shop.

All three of these are fixable. Most of them in an afternoon.

Does your website still matter in the age of AI?

This is the question every owner is asking right now. Google has AI Overviews. ChatGPT can search the web. Perplexity summarises entire topics. If AI is answering the questions, does your website even matter any more?

Yes. Here is why.

Good content is still good content. Giving people solid information to solve their problems is still the best way to get noticed online. Think of it like this: you know someone who is an expert on car servicing but no longer offers the service himself. He has no skin in the game, but his advice is reliable and trustworthy. That is what search engines have always been. And that is how AI tools are developing. They are just presenting the information in a different way.

The day is coming when websites are not presented as a static list of URLs. But the way these systems identify who to recommend is largely unchanged right now. They still crawl websites. They still read your content. They still look at structure, relevance, and authority.

If anything, the bar is higher. A well-structured, clearly written website with a proper sitemap and good metadata is more likely to be cited by AI tools, not less. The businesses that lose are the ones with thin content, no structure, and invisible sites. The same ones that were already struggling in traditional search.

One thing worth noting: Google is already trialling a system where it calls businesses directly to get pricing information on behalf of the person searching. Whether that expands to other AI models remains to be seen. But the direction is clear. AI needs good sources. Your website is one of them.

The one thing to do right now

Run the free Site Visibility Check. It takes 60 seconds. It checks 10 things. And it tells you, in plain English, what needs fixing first.

For many small businesses, their website is the shop front open 24 hours. Start by fixing the thing that is stopping people from finding it. That is step one.

If the check finds multiple issues, do not try to fix everything at once. Start with the most important one. Work through them over a few days. Do one, go back to your usual tasks, come back the next day or later in the week for the next one.

Once your website is findable, the next question is what else is not working in your marketing that could be sending more people to it. That is exactly what the free AI Marketing Health Check does. It scores your business out of 110 across six areas and shows you the single highest-value fix. About 2–3 minutes.

Related reading:

• How Do I Know Which Marketing to Do First?
• Should My Small Business Actually Be Using AI Right Now?
• Why Is My Marketing Not Working Even Though I Am Doing Everything Right?
• Free Brand Voice Guide: 7 Questions That Make AI Sound Like You