Why isn't my itch.io page showing up in Google?

The short answer: it is usually not that Google has banned you, it is that it has not found a good enough reason to crawl and index that page yet. A new page on a huge platform, with little text and nothing linking to it, can sit unseen for a long time. The fix is to check what is actually happening, make the page worth indexing, and give Google a path to it.

This is for indie developers who have put a game on itch.io, searched for it, and found nothing. Here is how I would work through it.

1. Check whether it is really missing

“Not showing up” can mean three different things, and the cure is different for each:

• Not indexed at all. Search for the exact address with site: in front of it, for example site:yourname.itch.io/your-game. If nothing comes back, Google has not indexed it.
• Indexed, but not ranking for your name. If the site: search finds it but searching your game’s title does not, the page is in Google’s index and the problem is competition, not indexing.
• Indexed, but the wrong thing shows. Another page, such as a jam entry, a mirror or a store listing, outranks it.

Do this in a private window so your own history does not change the results.

2. Is the page actually public?

A page set to draft, or restricted so that only people with a link can see it, is not meant to be indexed. Make sure the page is public before you troubleshoot anything else. It sounds obvious, and it is the most common cause I would check first.

3. Is there enough on the page to index?

A page that is a title, one screenshot and a sentence gives Google very little to work with, and a lot of near-identical pages around it. Give it:

• a title that says what the game is, not only its name (genre and platform help people and search engines);
• a proper description in your own words, a few short paragraphs, not a paste of the Steam blurb;
• screenshots with captions that describe what is happening in them;
• the things a player wants to know: what it is, how long it takes, controls, what platform it runs on.

4. Does anything link to it?

A page nobody links to is one Google may never come across. Your game page should be linked from places you control or contribute to: your own website, your devlog, your socials, your Discord, and any press or community posts that mention it. A couple of real links from real places do more than anything clever.

5. Give it time, and know what you cannot do

Indexing can take days or weeks, and on a platform you do not own you cannot ask Google to hurry. The “request indexing” tool in Google Search Console only works for sites you can verify as yours, and you cannot verify someone else’s domain. That is the real limit of relying on a platform page alone.

6. What you control: a page of your own

The reliable answer is a small page or site for the game on a domain you own, that you can add to Search Console, give a sitemap, and tune. It becomes the page that ranks for your game’s name, and it links to the itch.io page, so the platform page gets a link too. If your game has a generic name, a short, plain site matters even more, because you are competing with everything else called that.

I build exactly this for indie games: a fast website at the root of the domain and the game itself on its own path. You can see how that looks in the Last Lighthouse case study, and the service is described on the indie game websites page.

What I would not do

Do not pay for links, do not post the same link in a hundred places, and do not keep re-submitting the page. None of it speeds up indexing, and some of it can make things worse.

What to do next

If you are not sure which of these applies to you, send me the link and I will tell you what I would check first.