Getting listed on Google
Verify your site, submit the sitemap, and the files search engines and AI assistants read.
Publishing puts your site online. It doesn't tell Google it exists. This page is the short list of things to do once, right after your first publish.
Everything here lives in Settings → SEO and none of it needs a paid plan.
1. Verify that the site is yours
Search engines won't show you any data about a site until you prove you own it. Verification is that proof, and it's what unlocks the useful half of Search Console — which queries people found you with, which pages got indexed, what's broken.
- Open Google Search Console and add your site as a URL prefix property, using the address visitors actually use.
- Choose the HTML tag verification method. Google shows you a line that starts with
<meta name="google-site-verification". - Copy the whole line and paste it into the Google Search Console box under Settings → SEO → Search engine verification. Pasting just the code from inside the tag works too — we take whichever you give us.
- Save. The tag is live straight away — you don't need to republish. Now press Verify in Search Console.
The site does need to have been published at least once, though. On a site that has never been published there's no live page for Google to look at.
The same box exists for Bing Webmaster Tools and Naver Search Advisor. Each one shows you the exact tag it expects, so you can tell at a glance whether the code in your clipboard belongs there. Fill in the ones you care about and leave the rest empty — empty fields output nothing at all.
Verification needs the page to be publicly reachable. If the site is password protected, search engines can't see the tag — and they couldn't index the site anyway.
2. Submit your sitemap
Under the verification fields is Files search engines read, with a link to each. Copy the
first address — it ends in /sitemap.xml — and paste it into Search Console's Sitemaps
section.
You never edit these files. They're rebuilt from your pages and published entries on every publish.
| File | What's in it |
|---|---|
/sitemap.xml | Every indexable page, plus one entry per published collection item, plus language alternates on a multi-language site |
/robots.txt | Tells crawlers everything is fair game and points at the sitemap |
/llms.txt | A plain-text summary of the site for AI assistants |
Pages you've marked Hide from search engines, and pages set to members-only, are left out of all three.
3. Nothing else is required
The parts people usually worry about are already done for you on every publish: canonical
addresses, hreflang tags across languages, Open Graph and Twitter cards, structured data
describing your articles and products, real 404 status codes, image dimensions so the layout
doesn't jump, and paginated lists on clean /page/2 addresses that search engines treat as
pages in their own right.
About llms.txt
A growing share of searches ends in an answer from ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI summaries rather than a click. Those systems have to work out what a page says from rendered HTML, which is guesswork.
llms.txt hands them the answer directly: your site name, its description, and a list of your
pages and collection entries with their addresses. It's a short summary, not an index — the
sitemap is the exhaustive list.
It's generated automatically. There is no switch, and there's nothing to maintain.
Being readable is not the same as being cited. No one — us included — can promise a listing or a mention. What we can do is make sure nothing on our side is in the way.
How long does it take?
Days to weeks for a new address, and there's no way to speed it up. What you can do is make sure each page has its own description, so the pages that do get indexed are worth clicking. The SEO by page list in site settings shows which ones still don't.
The pre-publish check
What Tessolo's pre-publish check flags before a site goes live — SEO, dead links, images, forms, collections — and which issues really matter.
Previewing and sharing a draft
Preview a Tessolo draft inside the editor, check the phone view side by side, or send a private preview link or QR code before publishing.