Search engine visibility

Every document you share has a search engine visibility setting that controls one thing: whether search engines like Google are allowed to crawl the share link and list it in their results.

It is off by default. Out of the box, your share links carry a noindex instruction, so they won’t show up in Google — they only reach the people you send the link to. That’s the right default for proposals, client work and anything private.

Turn it on when you want a document to be found: anything you’d be happy for a stranger to discover through a search.

You’ll find the setting on the document’s page in your dashboard, under Search visibility.

When you’d want to turn it on

The best candidates are documents that work as a public page in their own right — something a person might realistically search for and be glad to land on. For example:

• A café or restaurant menu. Someone searching “brunch menu” and your area’s name can find it directly, and Google can read the dishes and prices off the page. A menu that only lives behind a private link never shows up.
• A property or listings brochure — an estate agent’s featured home, a car dealership’s stock list, a holiday let.
• A product catalogue or price list you’re happy for customers to browse before they get in touch.
• An event programme, timetable or festival guide people look up by name each year.
• A report, whitepaper or magazine you’re publishing to be read and shared widely.
• A gallery, portfolio or lookbook where being discoverable is the whole point.

The common thread: the content is meant to be public, and being findable helps rather than hurts. If a document is a private proposal, a client’s internal file, a draft, or anything with personal details, leave visibility off.

What turning it on does

When you switch visibility on for a document, two things happen:

• The share link stops telling search engines to stay away, so they’re now free to crawl and index it.
• We automatically add proper SEO to the page, built from the document’s own content — so it has the best chance of ranking and looking good in results.

You don’t have to write any of that yourself. From the document’s text we generate:

• a page title and meta description,
• Open Graph and Twitter/X card tags, so a shared link shows a rich preview,
• a canonical URL, so search engines know the one true address for the document,
• structured data (CreativeWork schema) describing the document,
• and a readable text version of the first few pages, so search engines (and anyone without JavaScript) can read the content, not just see the page-turning viewer.

It applies per document

Visibility is set on each document individually. Turning it on for one brochure doesn’t change anything about your other documents — they stay hidden from search unless you turn them on too.

Protected documents are never indexed

If a document is password-protected or behind an email gate, it stays out of search results even with visibility turned on. Search engines only ever see documents that are fully public. To make a gated document findable, remove the gate first.

Turning it back off — and why it isn’t instant

This is the important part to understand before you turn visibility on.

Turning visibility off immediately re-applies the noindex instruction, so search engines are told to stop listing the document. But that’s a request, and search engines act on it in their own time.

Removing a document from search takes time

Turning visibility off does not remove the document from search results straight away. It can take days or weeks for a search engine to re-crawl the page, honour the change and drop it from its index. During that window the document can still appear in results, and a cached copy may linger even longer.

If you need the content gone, turning visibility off is not enough. The only way to remove the content itself is to unpublish the document — that takes the page down, so there’s nothing left for a search engine to show.

In short:

You want to…	Do this
Stop appearing in new searches, over time	Turn search visibility off
Take the content down now	Unpublish the document

If you’re unsure, unpublish. You can always publish and re-enable visibility again later.

A note on timing when turning it on

The reverse is also true: turning visibility on doesn’t put you in Google instantly either. Search engines have to discover and crawl the page first, which can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Sharing the link and linking to it from your own site helps it get found sooner.

Next

Share a link — the basics of getting a document in front of readers.