Submitting your website to search engines (Google and Bing)

Search engines usually find a new website on their own, especially if other sites link to it. If you want it to go faster and want to be able to see how your site ranks in the search results, submit your site yourself to Google and Bing. The old separate submission via a form no longer exists: that now goes through the free webmaster tools of the search engines. Replace example.com below with your own domain each time.

1. Google Search Console

1. Go to Google Search Console and log in with a Google account.
2. Add your website as a Domain (for example example.com). Google will then ask you to add a TXT record to prove that the domain belongs to you.
3. Add that TXT record in My WebOké under My Domains, tab DNS, using + Add record (see Managing DNS records in My WebOké (with examples for CNAME, TXT, and external services)), or in DirectAdmin under DNS Management (see TXT records for verification (Google, Microsoft, and others)). Then click Verify in Search Console. It may take a while before the change is visible everywhere. If it doesn't work, read Verifying Google Search Console with a TXT record: how to avoid mistakes.
4. Submit your sitemap via Sitemaps, for example https://example.com/sitemap.xml. WordPress creates a sitemap itself (/wp-sitemap.xml), and plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math do this too. See also Checking your sitemap.
5. Want a single page to be included? Use URL inspection at the top and choose Request indexing. There's a daily limit per site for this. It's a request, not a guarantee, and requesting more often doesn't make it faster. If you have many pages, submit your sitemap instead.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools

1. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and log in.
2. If your site is already in Google Search Console, you can import it. Bing will then take over the verification and your sitemaps. Otherwise, add it yourself and confirm ownership, for example with a DNS record.
3. Submit your sitemap here too. Other search engines use Bing's results as well: DuckDuckGo gets most of its regular results from Bing, and Ecosia uses Bing by default (depending on country and device, other sources may also be used).

3. IndexNow: reporting changes instantly

IndexNow is an open way to immediately let search engines know that a page is new, changed, or deleted. Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, and a few other search engines participate and share the notifications with each other. Google does not participate; Google simply reads your sitemap. A notification also doesn't guarantee immediate inclusion.

• With the AI Builder you don't need to do anything: after publishing, the AI Builder reports the changed pages via IndexNow, unless your site is set to not be indexed.
• In WordPress you can use a plugin for IndexNow, such as Bing's IndexNow plugin in the WordPress plugin library.

Is my site already in Google?

Type site:example.com into Google. You'll then see part of the pages Google knows about for your domain. That's a quick impression, not a complete list. To see exactly which pages are and aren't included, and why, use Search Console with the Page indexing report and the URL inspection. See My page isn't in Google: how to find out why.

Good to know

• It can take days to weeks before your site appears in the search results. Submitting helps, but a top spot is never guaranteed.
• Check that your site isn't blocking search engines. In WordPress this is found under Settings > Reading: the checkbox Discourage search engines from indexing this site should be unchecked. More on this in Keeping a page out of Google: robots.txt or noindex?
• Google mentions useful, reliable content that matches the search query, a site that works well, and links from well known sites as signals for being found well. A clear title per page and original text help with this. See Setting the title, description, and alt text per page and Writing a page that gets found.

Want to learn more? Take the free course Getting found online, lesson 2.1 Google Search Console: adding and verifying your site or lesson 2.5 Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow.