Hundreds of pages, almost no traffic. Here's the fix.

You published thousands of pages. Google indexed almost none, and AI tools quote your competitors. The instinct is to publish more. That's the mistake.

The cause (one sentence)

Google judges your whole site before it bothers with any single page, and a wall of thin, near-identical pages tells it your site isn't worth trusting. So your good pages get buried with the rest.

What your Search Console is telling you

"Discovered, currently not indexed" = Google won't even crawl it. A site trust problem.

"Crawled, currently not indexed" = Google looked and said no. A page quality problem.

Whichever one you see most is where you start.

The fixes, in order

1. Cut, don't add. Pull every page with zero clicks in 3+ months. Improve it, merge it, or delete it. Five weak glossary stubs become one strong page. This alone lifts the quality signal dragging your whole site down.

2. Pass the keyword test. Remove the main term from a page. Is anything useful left? If not, it's thin. Add real data, an example, the questions people actually ask.

3. Link your pages together. A page with no internal links is invisible. Add 5 to 10 links from stronger pages to every page that matters.

4. Check for self-inflicted wounds. Stray noindex tags. A robots.txt blocking the crawler. Wrong canonical tags. One bad setting gets copied across thousands of templated pages.

5. Submit last, not first. Indexing tools help Google find good pages faster. They won't rescue a thin one.

Why AI won't quote you either

Same cause. ChatGPT and Perplexity quote content that's specific and checkable. To get cited:

• Answer the question in the first two sentences.
• Use real numbers with a named source.
• Add a clear author and a date.
• Earn mentions on other sites. Two-thirds of AI citations come from somewhere other than your own domain.

Skip the llms.txt hype. Google has said it doesn't use it.

Your 10-minute check

Search site:yourdomain.com. If a sliver of your pages show up, that's your answer. Then check which Search Console status dominates, run the keyword test on five pages, and see how many internal links point to a buried one. Zero links means zero chance.

The one thing to remember

Cut the dead weight, make the survivors genuinely useful, link them together, and show who wrote them. Indexing and citations follow trust. Earn the trust first.

Slower than publishing more. Also the only thing that works.