You publish your website. You search your own business name that night and nothing turns up, or worse, some old placeholder page beats you to the top spot. This trips up almost everyone with a new site. Nothing is broken.
Here's what actually happens between "site is live" and "site shows up in search results," and it's more mechanical than people expect.
Google has to crawl your site before it can rank it. A search engine doesn't watch the internet in real time. It sends out crawlers on their own schedule, and a brand new domain isn't on that schedule yet. Once a crawler finds your site and reads through it, your pages get added to Google's index, the massive list it searches when someone types something in. Only after that can you show up in results at all. For a new site with nothing pointing at it yet, this step alone can take anywhere from a few days to a couple weeks.
Every Cantrip site ships with two files that speed this up: a sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, and a robots.txt file that points to it. Both generate automatically, kept current as you publish. The sitemap is just a running list of every page and post on your site; robots.txt tells any crawler that shows up where to find that full list. That's the passive version of getting found. It works. It just isn't fast.
The faster version: tell Google directly. Set up a free Google Search Console account for your domain and submit your sitemap URL yourself. Cantrip doesn't do this step for you (there's no built-in Search Console connection yet), so it's the one piece of homework that's actually on you. It takes about five minutes, and it's the single biggest thing you can do to get a new site crawled faster instead of waiting for Google to stumble onto it.
If it's been a couple weeks and you're still not showing up, a few things are worth checking. Confirm your domain is pointed at your site; DNS can take a few hours to finish propagating after you first connect one. Search your exact business name in quotes and see if anything comes up at all, even on page five, since ranking well is a different problem from being indexed at all. Worth a look too: a "noindex" toggle left on in your page settings. It exists so you can hide something like a thank-you page from search, and it does exactly what it says, including on pages you didn't mean to hide.
None of this is a ranking hack. Getting indexed just means Google knows you exist. Where you land in the results once it does is a slower, separate fight, the one people usually mean when they say SEO. But you can't win that fight if you're not in the index in the first place, and getting into it doesn't take an SEO consultant. It takes a sitemap that already exists and five minutes in Search Console.