To submit a website to Google Search Console, add a property for your domain, verify ownership with a DNS TXT record, an HTML tag or an uploaded HTML file, then submit your sitemap in the Sitemaps report and request indexing for key pages with URL Inspection. Bing and Yandex have their own webmaster tools and also accept IndexNow pings.
Google finds most sites on its own by following links, so submitting is not a ranking trick and costs nothing. What Search Console gives you is visibility and control: you see which pages are indexed and why others are not, you hand Google a complete list of URLs through the sitemap, and you can ask it to recrawl a page after an important change.
Before you submit: make sure the site can be indexed
Verification can succeed on a site that search engines will never index. Spend five minutes on these checks first.
- Pages return HTTP 200. Not a 403 from a firewall, not a 503 from a maintenance plugin, not a redirect to a login page.
- There is one canonical host.
http://,https://,wwwand non-wwwshould all 301-redirect to a single version. - Nothing says noindex. Look for
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">in the HTML and anX-Robots-Tag: noindexresponse header. In WordPress, untick "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" under Settings → Reading; it is often left on after development. - robots.txt does not block everything. A leftover
Disallow: /from a staging server is a classic. - The sitemap lists only live, indexable URLs. No redirects, no 404s, no pages marked noindex.
- The site is not behind a password. HTTP authentication stops both crawling and file- or tag-based verification.
You can check all of this from a terminal. curl is built into macOS, most Linux distributions and Windows 10/11 (as curl.exe):
curl -sI https://example.com/
curl -sI http://example.com/
curl -sI https://www.example.com/
curl -s https://example.com/robots.txtThe canonical URL should answer 200; the other variants should answer 301 with a Location header pointing to it. In PowerShell, (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://example.com/ -Method Head).Headers prints the response headers. For background on how crawling and indexing actually work, see what website indexing is.
How do I add a website to Search Console?
Open search.google.com/search-console, sign in with a Google account and choose "Add property". Google asks you to pick one of two property types, and that choice decides how you can verify.
| Aspect | Domain property | URL-prefix property |
|---|---|---|
| What you enter | example.com, no protocol | https://example.com/, with protocol |
| What it covers | every protocol and subdomain: http, https, www, shop. and so on | only URLs that start with that exact prefix |
| Verification | DNS only | HTML file, HTML tag, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager or DNS |
| Best for | owners with DNS access who want the full picture | no DNS access, or a report for one section of a site |
If you control DNS, create a Domain property: one verification covers the whole domain and you will not miss data because a page was served on a different host. You can add URL-prefix properties later for separate sections. Google's own walkthrough is in the "Add a website property" help article.
How do I connect my website to Google Search Console?
"Connecting" a site means proving you own it. Google gives you a token and several places to put it; the full list is in its ownership verification guide.
DNS TXT record
Required for Domain properties. At your DNS host (registrar, hosting panel or Cloudflare) add a TXT record on the root of the domain with the value Google shows you:
google-site-verification=AbCdEf123...A TXT record can sit alongside SPF, other verification tokens and anything else; one domain can hold many TXT records. More on how they work in the TXT record guide.
HTML tag
Paste the tag into the <head> of your home page:
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="AbCdEf123..." />Most CMSs and SEO plugins have a field for header code or for the verification token itself. A tag that ends up in <body> will not count.
HTML file upload
Download the file (named like google0123456789abcdef.html) and upload it unchanged to the web root, so that it opens at https://example.com/google0123456789abcdef.html.
Google Analytics or Tag Manager
If the site already runs a Google Analytics tag or a Tag Manager container under the same Google account with sufficient permissions, Search Console can use it as proof. Convenient, but the verification breaks if the tag is ever removed.
| Method | Where it goes | Access needed | Common failure |
|---|---|---|---|
| DNS TXT | DNS zone | DNS host panel | record added at the wrong DNS provider, or not yet visible to resolvers |
| HTML tag | home page <head> | template or CMS settings | stale page served from cache, tag placed in <body> |
| HTML file | web root | FTP, SSH or file manager | CMS rewrite rules return 404 or redirect to the home page |
| Analytics / GTM | existing tag | admin rights on the tag | tag missing on the home page or added through a different account |
Leave the token in place after verification. Search Console rechecks ownership periodically, and removing the record, tag or file eventually removes your access.
When verification fails
For DNS, confirm the record is actually published:
# macOS / Linux
dig TXT example.com +short
# Windows cmd
nslookup -type=TXT example.com
# Windows PowerShell
Resolve-DnsName example.com -Type TXTIf the token is not in the output even though you added it, the domain is probably served by other name servers than the panel you edited; dig NS example.com +short shows which ones are authoritative. DNS changes also take time to spread because resolvers keep old answers until their TTL expires. For the tag method, open the page source (Ctrl+U) and search for google-site-verification; if it is missing, purge your page cache and CDN. For the file method, run curl -sI on the file URL and make sure it returns 200 rather than a redirect.
How can I submit my website URL to Google?
Once the property is verified, there are two ways to hand Google your URLs.
- Submit a sitemap. Go to Indexing → Sitemaps, enter the sitemap URL (for example
sitemap.xml) and press Submit. The report shows whether Google could fetch and read it. Also list the sitemap in robots.txt with aSitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xmlline so every crawler can find it. Under the sitemaps.org protocol, one file holds up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed; larger sites use a sitemap index. - Request indexing for individual pages. Paste a URL into the URL Inspection bar at the top of Search Console, wait for the result and click "Request Indexing". The quota is limited, so use it for new or significantly changed pages, not for the whole site.
Two things you can skip. Google no longer accepts the old sitemap "ping" URL; a sitemap in Search Console and robots.txt is enough. And the Indexing API is not a shortcut for ordinary pages: Google documents it only for job posting and livestream pages. Google also says that crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks after a request, and repeated requests do not speed it up — see "Ask Google to recrawl your URLs". Details on sitemap structure and limits are in our XML sitemap guide, and robots.txt syntax is covered in the robots.txt guide.
How do I get my website listed on Google search?
Submission gets a page discovered; it does not guarantee it gets indexed. After some time, open Indexing → Pages. Two statuses confuse people most:
- Discovered – currently not indexed: Google knows the URL exists but has not crawled it yet.
- Crawled – currently not indexed: Google fetched the page and chose not to index it for now, usually because of thin or duplicate content rather than a technical fault.
What moves pages from discovered to indexed is mostly outside Search Console: internal links from pages that are already indexed, a clean URL structure without endless parameter duplicates, fast and stable server responses, and main content that is present in the HTML rather than injected only by JavaScript. A quick sanity check is the site:example.com operator, but it is approximate; the Pages report is the authoritative view. If a site still does not appear, work through the causes in why a website is not showing in search.
Bing, Yandex and IndexNow
Google is not the only engine worth registering with.
- Bing Webmaster Tools can import sites that are already verified in Google Search Console, which saves a second verification.
- Yandex Webmaster (webmaster.yandex.com) matters if you have Russian-speaking visitors. You add the exact canonical address with protocol and verify with a meta tag
<meta name="yandex-verification" content="…" />, an uploaded HTML file, or a DNS TXT recordyandex-verification: …. It treatshttp/httpsandwww/non-wwwas different sites, and it has its own tools to submit a sitemap and request a recrawl of specific pages.
IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a site notify search engines the moment a URL is added, changed or deleted. Bing and Yandex accept it, and participating engines share submissions with each other, so one ping is enough. Google does not participate, so IndexNow complements Search Console rather than replacing it. We use it ourselves: enterno.io sends new and updated pages through IndexNow automatically.
Setup takes a few minutes. Generate a key (for example with openssl rand -hex 16), save it in a text file named <key>.txt in your web root with the key as its only content, then submit URLs:
# one URL
curl "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://example.com/new-page&key=YOUR_KEY"
# several URLs
curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
-d '{"host":"example.com","key":"YOUR_KEY","keyLocation":"https://example.com/YOUR_KEY.txt","urlList":["https://example.com/page-1","https://example.com/page-2"]}'200 means the URLs were accepted, 202 that they were accepted while the key is still being validated, 403 that the key file was not found or does not match, 422 that the URLs do not belong to the host, and 429 that you are sending too many requests. The IndexNow documentation has the full specification. Many CMS plugins can send pings automatically.
| Tool | Reaches | Verification | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | DNS for Domain; five methods for URL prefix | Pages report, URL Inspection, Request Indexing, sitemap status | |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Bing | own methods or import from Search Console | index reports, sitemap submission |
| Yandex Webmaster | Yandex | meta tag, HTML file or DNS TXT | index reports, recrawl requests, URL status, robots.txt analysis |
| IndexNow | Bing, Yandex and other participants | key file on your host | instant change notifications, no reports |
How to check your site before submitting
Run your home page and a couple of important URLs through the SEO audit to check that each page is ready to be indexed. Use the DNS lookup to confirm that your Google or Yandex verification TXT record is published with the right value, and the HTTP header checker to see status codes, redirects and headers such as X-Robots-Tag.
Frequently asked questions
Is submitting a website to Google free?
Yes. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Yandex Webmaster and IndexNow are all free. Nobody can sell you faster or guaranteed indexing in Google.
Does submitting my site improve rankings?
No. Submission helps Google discover and monitor pages; ranking depends on the pages themselves, their links and how well they answer the query.
Can I submit a URL without verifying the site?
URL Inspection and sitemap reports need a verified property. Without one, you can still list the sitemap in robots.txt and let Google find it, and you can use IndexNow for Bing and Yandex.
Should I choose a Domain or URL-prefix property?
Domain if you can edit DNS: it covers every subdomain and protocol with one verification. URL prefix if you cannot touch DNS or need a separate report for one section.
How long does it take for a new site to appear on Google?
There is no fixed timeline. Google's documentation says crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks; check the status of specific URLs in URL Inspection instead of waiting.
Do I need to resubmit the sitemap after every update?
No. Google rereads a submitted sitemap on its own. Keep the file current and the lastmod dates accurate, and request indexing only for pages that changed significantly.
