Chapter 6 · Get Google to Know You: Three Indexing Tasks

Where you are, and what this chapter solves

Last chapter your site went live and the whole world can reach it. But Google doesn’t know you exist — nobody can find you in search. This chapter gets Google to start indexing your pages, the starting line between “a site exists” and “a site has traffic”.

What you’ll have when this chapter is done

Google Search Console (GSC) set up — all your traffic data lives here from now on
The sitemap submitted, and key pages requested for indexing

A few words to know

Indexing: Google taking your pages into its “library”. Indexed pages can rank; ranked pages get traffic. Google might take weeks to crawl a new site’s pages on its own, which is why the third task below actively nudges it.
sitemap: an auto-generated “site table of contents” handed to Google, telling it which pages you have and which were updated recently. You do nothing — the template generates it.
GSC (Google Search Console): the backstage where Google hands out report cards — who searched what, whether they clicked your site; it’s all here from now on.

Step 1: Register with Google Search Console (GSC)

What to do: get the “business registration” Google issues you. How to do it: open search.google.com/search-console → log into your Google account → Add property. Choose the URL prefix type, enter your https://project-name.pages.dev (or your domain), pick the HTML tag verification method, and Google hands you a snippet of code — you don’t paste it yourself; take the string of letters inside the tag’s content="..." and put it into an environment variable: name PUBLIC_GSC_VERIFICATION, value that string of letters. Where the variable goes depends on your path: if you deleted wrangler.toml (chapter 5), add it under Cloudflare → Settings → Variables and Secrets; if you kept wrangler.toml, put it in its [vars] section (while that file exists, dashboard settings are ignored — see the dev manual’s feature-toggle chapter). Save and redeploy, then go back to GSC and click “Verify”. You’ll see: GSC shows “Ownership verified”. Confirm it worked: the left sidebar of GSC opens pages like “Performance”.

Step 2: Submit the sitemap

What to do: hand Google the table-of-contents page the template generated. How to do it: GSC left menu → Sitemaps → type sitemap-index.xml in the input box → click Submit. You’ll see: the status column shows “Success”. Confirm it worked: come back in a day or two and “Discovered URLs” has started climbing above 0.

Step 3: Click Request indexing for key pages

What to do: Google might take weeks to crawl a new site’s pages on its own — actively nudge the most important ones. How to do it: in the inspection box at the top of GSC, paste your codes page’s full URL and press Enter → click Request indexing. Run the most important 5 to 10 URLs through one by one (codes page first). You’ll see: each URL shows “Indexing requested”.

Two more things happen automatically — no action from you: once you buy your own domain and put it on Cloudflare, Cloudflare notifies Bing and other search engines for you (a feature called Crawler Hints — an automatic nudge to Bing; plain pages.dev addresses don’t get it, which is fine since Google is the main engine), and your /llms.txt page tells AI engines like ChatGPT what content you have.

Post-launch self-check (optional, 5 minutes)

pnpm build
BASE_URL=https://your-url pnpm check-sitemap
pnpm check-links

All three run clean — every URL returns 200 (opens fine) and no internal link is dead — and the site is healthy.

If you get stuck

“GSC verification fails”: confirm the PUBLIC_GSC_VERIFICATION value is the string inside the tag’s content quotes (no quotes), that you really redeployed after saving, and that the variable went to the right place (dashboard Variables if you deleted wrangler.toml, the file’s [vars] otherwise — see Step 1).
“Sitemap submission says couldn’t fetch”: wait a few hours and retry (Google’s crawling lags); also confirm https://your-domain/sitemap-index.xml opens.
“Discovered URLs still 0 after days”: wait a few more days and click Request indexing a few more rounds; indexing has its own pace, and Chapter 8’s weekly routine keeps nudging it.

✅ Acceptance criteria (all must hold)

GSC verified, sitemap submitted
☐ At least 5 URLs have had indexing requested (codes page first)
☐ You know where in GSC to check “Discovered URLs”

Next step

Google has started crawling you — but turning traffic into money still takes two steps: ads, and weekly freshness. The next chapter turns the ad slots on. Go to Chapter 7 · Turn On Ads, Start Earning