How to get Google, Bing and ChatGPT to find your new website

1. Make sure search engines can read your site

Before you submit anything, check that nothing is blocking the door. These four problems stop more new sites than anything else:

• A leftover "noindex" tag. Many site builders hide a site from Google while it's being built. If no one turns that off, Google is told to ignore every page. In WordPress, check Settings → Reading and make sure "Discourage search engines" is unchecked.
• A robots.txt that blocks everything. Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, search engines are locked out.
• No sitemap. Visit yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. If it's missing, ask whoever built your site to add one, or turn it on in your SEO plugin.
• Text that only appears after the page loads. Some modern site builders send an empty page and fill it in with JavaScript. Google can usually handle it, but slowly. Right-click your page and choose "View page source": if you can't find your headline in that text, your site is harder for search engines to read.

2. Set up Google Search Console

Search Console is Google's free dashboard for your site. It shows which pages are indexed, what people searched to find you, and any problems Google ran into.

1. Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with the Google account you use for your business.
2. Choose Domain as the property type and enter your domain without "www" or "https" (for example, yourbusiness.com). This covers every version of your site.
3. Google gives you a TXT record. Add it in your domain registrar's DNS settings (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace and others all have a DNS page). Then click Verify. It can take a few minutes to an hour.

3. Submit your sitemap

Your sitemap is a list of every page you want found. Submitting it tells Google exactly what exists.

1. In Search Console, open Sitemaps in the left menu.
2. Type sitemap.xml and click Submit.
3. Resubmit whenever you add a batch of new pages. The page count should grow each time.

If the status says "Couldn't fetch," open the sitemap address in your browser. If it doesn't load, fix that first.

4. Request indexing for your most important pages

For pages that matter most, you can ask Google to look right away.

1. Paste the full page address into the search bar at the top of Search Console (this is the URL Inspection tool).
2. If it says "URL is not on Google," click Request indexing.

Google limits how many of these you can send each day (in practice, about 10), so do your most-searched pages first: your homepage, your main service pages, your location pages and your contact page. Requesting the same page over and over doesn't help.

5. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools

Most owners skip Bing. That's a mistake now that people ask AI tools for recommendations: Bing's index powers Microsoft Copilot and is one of the sources behind other AI search tools.

1. Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in.
2. Choose Import from Google Search Console. It copies your verified site over in one click, with no extra code.
3. Open Sitemaps and submit sitemap.xml there too.

6. Turn on IndexNow

IndexNow is a free, open way to tell search engines the moment a page is added or changed. Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep use it. Google does not, so you still need steps 3 and 4.

• WordPress: install the official IndexNow plugin, or turn it on in Yoast or Rank Math if your version includes it.
• Cloudflare: turn on Crawler Hints, which sends IndexNow pings for you.
• Other sites: ask your web person. It's a small key file plus a ping each time you publish.

With IndexNow on, Bing usually picks up new pages within days instead of weeks.

7. Get links from places search engines already trust

Submitting pages tells Google they exist. Links tell Google they matter. A brand-new site is found and ranked mostly through links pointing to it from sites Google already knows. Start with the ones you control:

• Your Google Business Profile. Make sure the website field points to your site, and link to your best page in your posts.
• Your social profiles. Put your website in the bio of Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok.
• Your YouTube channel. Add your site to the channel description and to the descriptions of your most-watched videos.
• A post for every new page or section. Share it on LinkedIn and Instagram with one plain sentence about what it answers.
• People you already work with. Suppliers, referral partners, landlords, sponsors and associations often have "partners" or "members" pages. Ask to be listed.
• Your local community. Chamber of commerce, neighborhood business associations, local news and event listings.

Avoid buying links or joining link schemes. Google ignores or penalizes them, and they don't help with AI tools either.

8. Watch the right numbers

In Search Console, open Performance and look at the last 28 days.

• Impressions come first. They count how often you appeared in results, even if no one clicked. Rising impressions mean Google is testing you.
• Clicks come later, as your pages climb.
• Open the Queries tab to see the searches you're showing up for. Look for your service plus your town, like "roof repair Oakland." That's the signal it's working.
• Check Pages → Indexing once a month to see which pages are in and which were left out, and why.

What to expect

In my experience, a new site or subdomain usually takes a few weeks before Google indexes most of its pages, and a few months before rankings settle. Getting impressions early, even with only a few pages indexed, is a good sign.

Two things speed it up more than anything else: getting your pages live, and getting links to them. Everything else in this guide is minor by comparison.