Can't find your business on Google? Here is why, and what fixes it
Five causes, in the order worth checking them, from the ten-minute fixes to the ones that take a season.
Read the answerThe questions people type, answered.
Each page takes one question a business owner asks — usually after searching for their own company and not finding it — and answers it in the first paragraph. The rest of the page is the working: how to check it yourself, what fixes it, and what to stop paying for.
Nothing here needs an agency to act on. Where the honest answer is a setting you can change in ten minutes, the page says so before it says anything else.
What is a SERP, and why does it matter to your business?
The page Google shows after a search, what is actually on it now, and why position one no longer means what it used to.
Read the answerWhat is AI SEO? A plain-English answer
Two meanings travel under one label. One is worth paying for; the other is mostly a way to publish more pages faster.
Read the answerHow do I get my product or business shown in ChatGPT?
Where ChatGPT's recommendations come from, the crawler setting that quietly rules many sites out, and the work that moves the answer over time.
Read the answerHow do I get my website into Google's AI Overviews?
What Google says it requires, which is less than most advice suggests, and what separates the pages it cites from the pages it merely reads.
Read the answerWhy does ChatGPT say the wrong things about my company?
Old training data, contradictory sources, or a name shared with someone else. How to tell which, and how to correct it.
Read the answerIs SEO dead? What actually changed, and what didn't
Search stopped being ten blue links years ago, and it just changed again. The question is what that means for a business trying to be found, not whether the word still applies.
Read the answerHow long does SEO take to work?
Google's own guidance puts it at four months to a year. Here's what actually happens inside that window, and why the first few weeks are the least reliable part of it.
Read the answerWhy is my website traffic dropping?
You were getting clicks, and now you aren't. Google's own debugging guidance narrows the search to six causes, and here's how to check each one against your own data.
Read the answerDoes Google penalize AI-generated content?
Google's own words: it rewards high-quality content "however it is produced." The spam policy targets volume and manipulation, not the tool that typed it.
Read the answerDoes schema markup help SEO?
It makes a page eligible for rich results. It does not move your position in the ranking. Here is the distinction Google itself draws.
Read the answerDoes website speed affect SEO?
Yes, as one signal among many. The three metrics Google measures, the current thresholds, and where speed's real payoff sits.
Read the answerWhy is Google rewriting my page title?
Google names specific, documented triggers for replacing a title tag. Most of them are fixable on your own page in an afternoon.
Read the answerWhat is E-E-A-T, and does it actually affect rankings?
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust: the framework behind Google's quality raters, what it isn't, and what a small business can actually show for it.
Read the answerWhat is local SEO? A plain-English answer
Google names three ranking factors for local search. Only two of them are things you can actually work on.
Read the answerDo I need a website if I already have a Google Business Profile?
The profile covers the map. It doesn't cover organic search, AI answers, or closing the sale.
Read the answerHow to get more Google reviews without breaking Google's rules
The fastest path is also the compliant one: ask directly, send the real link, never trade anything for it.
Read the answerWhy is my Google Business Profile suspended?
Almost always a guideline match, not a manual grudge. Here's what usually trips it and how the appeal actually works.
Read the answerWhat is llms.txt, and do I actually need one?
A 2024 proposal for a Markdown index file, what Google has said about it, and why crawl access matters more than the file itself.
Read the answerWhere does ChatGPT get its information from?
Two different systems produce a ChatGPT answer: a trained model with a fixed cutoff, and live search that crawls and cites pages in real time. What each one means for a business trying to be found.
Read the answerLooking for a one-line definition rather than an answer? The AI search glossary covers the vocabulary. For how the disciplines differ, start with what separates SEO from GEO.