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Site Not Showing on Google or in AI Answers? Check This First

What to do when your readiness score is stuck around 50, Google shows none of your pages, and no AI assistant ever mentions you — no matter how much content you publish.

Your whole site is telling search engines to go away

Symptom. Some combination of:

  • Waggle’s readiness score sits near 50/100 and won’t move, with “Visible to search engines” failing in the Audit.
  • site:example.com on Google returns nothing, or Search Console reports pages as “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag”.
  • Brand citation checks never find a mention, and your AI bot traffic is flat.
  • Your robots.txt reads Disallow: / even though you never wrote that rule, and any crawler rules you set in Waggle don’t appear in the served file.

Why this happens. WordPress has a single checkbox — Settings → Reading → “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” — that switches off indexing for the entire site. It is not a Waggle setting, and Waggle cannot override it. When it is on, WordPress itself:

  • adds <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> to every page,
  • serves Disallow: / in robots.txt for every user agent,
  • and suppresses your XML sitemap.

Search engines that honour those directives drop the site, and AI answer engines that respect noindex won’t cite it either. No amount of on-page or AEO work gets around it.

It is almost always switched on by accident. WordPress offers it during installation, most staging and “coming soon” tools set it automatically, and hosts that clone a staging site to production frequently carry it across. Nothing in the WordPress admin nags you about it after setup, so it can sit there for months.

How to confirm.

  1. Open Settings → Reading and look at “Search engine visibility”. If “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is ticked, that’s it.
  2. Or check what your site actually serves: 
    curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -i "name=['"]robots"

    An affected site returns <meta name='robots' content='noindex, nofollow' />.

  3. Or load https://example.com/robots.txt — an affected site shows: 
    User-agent: *
Disallow: /
  4. In Waggle, the warning banner appears at the top of every screen, and the Audit’s “Visible to search engines” check fails.

Fix.

  1. Go to Settings → Reading, untick “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”, and click Save Changes.
  2. Back in Waggle, run the audit again — the score should recover 10 points immediately and the site-wide banner disappears.
  3. Optionally, submit your sitemap in Google Search Console to prompt a re-crawl.

Then be patient. Removing the block is instant, but search engines re-crawl on their own schedule — expect days to a few weeks before pages reappear, and longer before AI assistants that rely on those indexes start citing you again.

What kept working while it was on

Waggle’s machine-readable channels are deliberately unaffected by this setting, because AI crawlers are not search engines and the setting is a search-engine signal: /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt, your .md pages and /pricing.md all continued to serve normally. What stopped was search indexing, your XML sitemap, and any crawler rules you configured under AI → Crawlers.