How to check whether search engines can see your site
Open your live site and do four things: search the page source for your own headline, visit /sitemap.xml, visit /robots.txt, and search Google for site:yourdomain.com. Those four answer almost every "why can nobody find me" question, and none of them need a tool or an account.
Check one: are your words in the page?
Right-click your live page and choose View Page Source. Press Ctrl+F, or Cmd+F on a Mac, and search for a sentence you actually wrote. If it is there, good. If the source is mostly script tags and your writing is nowhere in it, search engines are largely receiving an empty page.
Do not use Inspect or Developer Tools for this. Those show the page after your browser has built it, which is precisely the step a crawler may not do.
Check two: does a sitemap exist?
Go to yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. You want a list of addresses. A 404 means nothing is announcing your pages, which matters most when the site is new and nobody links to you yet.
Check three: is anything blocking crawlers?
Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / blocks the entire site. Then back in the page source, search for the word noindex. Either one hides you completely, and both are default settings on staging sites that reach production far too often.
Check four: what does Google already have?
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. That lists what it currently holds for you. Zero results on a site older than a month, with the first three checks passing, is worth investigating in Search Console. A handful of results means you are indexed and the question is ranking, which is a different and slower problem.
What each result means
| What you found | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Words missing from source | The page may be indexed as empty | The output has to render on the server |
| No sitemap | Nothing is announcing your pages | Generate one, submit it in Search Console |
| Disallow: / or noindex | You are asking not to be listed | Remove it, then request indexing |
| site: shows nothing, site is old | Something is wrong upstream | Search Console will name the reason |