Launch and Monitor Your Nuxt Site

Submit your sitemap to Search Console, verify your site, and monitor the Page Indexing report weekly. Track visibility in AI Overviews and chat citations alongside traditional rankings.

Pre-Launch Checklist

Before deploying to production:

• Production domain configured with SSL certificate
• robots.txt permits intended search and retrieval providers on public pages; training and usage preferences follow your chosen policy
• No noindex meta tags on pages you want indexed
• Sitemap generated at /sitemap.xml
• Canonical URLs point to production domain
• Social preview images working
• Mobile-friendly design
• Diagnose loading and interactions in lab tests; assess Core Web Vitals when qualifying field data exists
• 404 pages return proper status codes
• Redirects from old URLs configured (if redesigning)

For new domains, start this process 4-8 weeks early. See Pre-Launch SEO Warmup for a week-by-week timeline.

Don't delay your launch chasing perfection. Ship with working fundamentals, then iterate.

Getting Indexed & Cited

Google Search inclusion requires its indexing process. Other AI providers have their own retrieval and user-triggered fetch mechanisms; Google indexing does not establish eligibility everywhere.

Crawlability means search engines can access your pages. Indexing means they've added your pages to their database.

Read the Going Live guide for deployment strategies and common pitfalls.

Submit to Search Engines

Search engines can discover URLs through links. Sitemap submission provides another discovery path. Set up Google Search Console and submit your sitemap:

1. Add your property (domain property recommended)
2. Verify Domain properties through DNS. URL-prefix properties support Google’s listed methods, including DNS, HTML files, or meta tags
3. Submit sitemap at Indexing > Sitemaps

For Bing, submit through Bing Webmaster Tools or use IndexNow for instant notification to Bing and Yandex.

Check Indexing & AI Visibility

# Search for your domain
site:yourdomain.com

# Check specific page
site:yourdomain.com/specific-page

Google Search Console shows detailed indexing data under Page Indexing reports:

• Indexed: in Google's index
• Discovered - currently not indexed: found but not crawled yet
• Crawled - currently not indexed: crawled but Google chose not to index

See Debugging Indexing Issues for fixes when pages won't index.

For AI visibility, Search Console's Generative AI performance report (linked below the Performance chart) shows impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Click data isn't included yet.

Monitoring Performance

Set up these tools after launch:

See SEO Monitoring Tools for setup guides and recommendations.

Track these metrics every week:

Search Console:

• Web impressions and clicks; generative AI impressions separately
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Average position for target keywords
• Page indexing errors

Analytics:

• Organic traffic trends
• Top landing pages
• Bounce rate

Core Web Vitals:

• LCP at or below 2.5s
• INP at or below 200ms
• CLS at or below 0.1

Don't obsess over daily fluctuations. Look for trends over weeks and months.

Common Post-Launch Issues

Site not indexing after weeks: Check robots.txt, verify no noindex tags, confirm sitemap submitted correctly. See Indexing Issues.

Pages indexed but not cited by AI: An indexed page is not guaranteed an AI citation. Review whether the page answers the reader's question accurately. See AI Search Optimization.

High impressions, low clicks: Review titles, descriptions, query mix, and changes in search appearance. AI impression data alone cannot explain a click decline. The CTR opportunity finder can help compare your available Search Console data.

Migrating to a new domain? See Site Migration SEO for redirect mapping and recovery timelines.

Deep Dive Guides