“How do I update my website on Google?” — you probably mean one of three things

Type “how to update my website” into Google and the first platform it offers you is Google. Ahead of WordPress. Ahead of Squarespace and GoDaddy.

Which is odd, because your website is not on Google. But the phrase is doing real work — it is how people describe a genuine problem they are having. The trouble is that three completely different problems wear that same sentence, and they have three completely different fixes. Sorting out which one you have takes about a minute and saves a lot of clicking.

1. Your website itself

The actual pages, at your own address. Change a price here and the price is changed, instantly, for anyone who visits.

If that is not your experience — if changing a sentence means emailing someone and waiting — you do not have a Google problem, you have an access problem, and it is worth reading who actually controls your website before you do anything else.

But assume you have changed it and the change is live. Then this is not your problem, and the next one probably is.

2. What Google shows about your site

This is the big one. You updated the page a week ago and Google is still showing last year’s prices, or the old phone number, or a description of a service you stopped offering.

Google is not showing your page. It is showing its stored copy of your page, taken the last time it visited. That copy updates when Google comes back, and Google is blunt about the timing: “Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Be patient and monitor progress.”

You can nudge it. In Google Search Console, the URL Inspection tool lets an owner or full user of the property request a recrawl of one page. Two caveats, both in Google’s own words: “Keep in mind that there’s a quota for submitting individual URLs and requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL won’t get it crawled any faster”, and “requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all.”

So: submit it once, then leave it alone. Pressing the button repeatedly is the digital equivalent of jabbing the lift call button, and Google has said so in writing.

One more thing worth knowing, because it catches people who have done everything right. Even after a recrawl, the grey description under your link may not be the one you wrote. Google says snippets “are primarily created from the page content itself” and that it uses the meta description “when it describes the page better than other parts of the content”. Your description is a suggestion, not an instruction.

3. Your Google Business Profile

The panel that appears beside the results with your name, opening hours, phone number, photos and reviews. For a shop, a salon, a garage or a surgery, this is usually what the customer actually looked at — and it is not your website.

It is a listing Google hosts. You can put your website address into it, but the two are separate systems and changing one changes nothing about the other. You edit it directly: on Google Search, go to your Business Profile, select Edit profile, make the change and save. Google adds one caveat — “we review your changes before we update them live on your profile” — so it is quick, but not always instant.

One prerequisite that stops people cold: you have to have claimed the listing first. Google’s help page is explicit that you need to add or claim your Business Profile and verify it before you can edit it — and plenty of businesses have a profile they have never claimed, assembled by Google from other sources. If you cannot find an Edit profile button anywhere, that is why, and claiming it is the actual first job.

If your wrong opening hours are costing you customers, that is this box, not your site. We went through the full version of that problem in the day your opening hours were wrong.

Which one is yours: three questions

Can you see the change when you visit your own site? If no, it is problem one — the change never went live.

Is the wrong information in the blue-link result, or in the box beside it? Blue link is problem two. Box is problem three.

Is it your hours, phone, address, photos or reviews? Almost certainly problem three, whatever your website says.

What we do about it here, and what it does not fix

We publish something on this site most days, so the recrawl question is a live one for us rather than a theoretical one.

Every time a post goes up, we ping IndexNow — an open protocol that tells search engines a URL has changed, instantly, without waiting to be discovered. It works well. It is also supported by Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon, and Google is not a participant. So it does precisely nothing for our Google results.

For Google, the honest answer is that there are two levers — keep a sitemap so pages are easy to discover, and request a recrawl of a genuinely important page once — and after that it is patience. Nobody has a third lever, and anyone selling you one is selling you something else.

What argues the other way

Autocomplete is not a survey. The observation at the top is exactly one thing: what Google’s own suggestions returned when I ran that query. It tells you the phrasing exists and is common enough to suggest. It does not tell you how many people search it, and I have no volume figure to offer.

Sometimes it really is faster than a few weeks. Google’s “days to weeks” is guidance for the general case. An established site that publishes often gets crawled far more frequently than a five-page site that has not changed since 2023. If your pages update within a day, nothing is wrong — you are just not the general case.

And problem two is sometimes worth ignoring. If the stale detail is cosmetic, waiting costs nothing. It is worth chasing when the stale detail is a price, a phone number or a closure — something that sends a real customer to the wrong place.

The short version

Your website changes the second you change it. Google’s copy of it changes when Google next visits, which its own documentation puts at days to weeks and which you can nudge exactly once. Your Business Profile is a different thing entirely, you edit it directly, and it is usually the one that was wrong. Work out which of the three you are actually looking at before you spend an afternoon fixing the wrong one.

Sources, all read directly on 24 August 2026: Google Search Central’s ask Google to recrawl your URLs for the days-to-weeks timing, the URL Inspection method, the submission quota and the no-guarantee wording; Google’s snippet documentation for how the description under your link is chosen; Google Business Profile help for the edit route and the review step; and the IndexNow FAQ for the list of participating search engines. The autocomplete observation is our own, made on 24 August 2026, and is offered as evidence that the phrasing is common — not as search-volume data.