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Two checks resolve most reports.
1

Is the site blocking search engines?

Settings > Reading, the Discourage search engines box. If ticked, nothing else matters. Rankify raises this at the top of its own settings screen too.
2

Is another SEO plugin active?

Two plugins writing the same tags produces duplicates, and search engines pick between them unpredictably. Deactivate one.

Indexing

Work through it in order:
  1. Check the noindex setting for that content type on the Content Types tab.
  2. Check robots.txt is not blocking the path.
  3. Confirm the page is in your sitemap at /sitemap.xml.
  4. Confirm the sitemap is submitted in Search Console.
  5. Use Search Console’s URL Inspection on the specific page. It tells you exactly why Google excluded it, which no plugin can.
Then wait. Indexing takes days to weeks, and a new site takes longer.
Set it to noindex and leave it crawlable. Do not block it in robots.txt: a blocked page can still appear in results with no description, because the crawler was never allowed to read the noindex directive.Removal from the index takes a recrawl. Search Console’s removals tool is faster if it is urgent.
Check permalinks first. Under Settings > Permalinks, anything other than Plain works; on Plain the sitemap URL cannot be served.Then check that at least one post type is selected under what goes in the sitemap, and that those types are not all noindexed.
A physical robots.txt file on disk always wins over the one WordPress serves. Check your site root. If one exists, either delete it or edit it directly.

Titles and descriptions

Normal, and not a fault. Google rewrites titles when it judges its own version more useful for the query, especially if yours is very long, keyword-stuffed, or does not match the page content.Write shorter, more accurate titles. There is no setting that forces Google to use yours.
Another SEO plugin, or a theme, is also outputting a title tag. View source and count. If it is your theme, use rankify_filter_document_title to decide which one wins.
That is deliberate. Rankify reads what the old plugin stored and uses it wherever you have not set your own value. Editing the field in Rankify overrides it permanently. See switching to Rankify.To stop it entirely, turn off the reuse setting.
The default template is %%excerpt%%, which falls back to the start of the content. A page built entirely with a page builder often has no meaningful content in the post body, so there is nothing to fall back to. Write descriptions by hand on those pages.

Schema

Read which type it names. Each has required fields, and a missing one makes the page ineligible rather than penalized. Fill them in on the post.
Your theme, page builder, or another plugin is also outputting JSON-LD. Search for application/ld+json in the page source. Turn off whichever you do not want, or use rankify_output_schema to disable Rankify’s on specific templates.
Valid markup makes a page eligible, not guaranteed. Google decides per query, and a page that does not rank well has no result to enrich. There is nothing to fix in the plugin.

Social previews

Platforms cache aggressively. Use Facebook’s or LinkedIn’s sharing debugger to force a refetch after changing an image.
The page has no featured image and no fallback share image is set. Set one, at least 1200 by 630 pixels.

Redirects

Rules only run on requests that would otherwise return a 404. If the URL resolves to a real page, the rule is skipped by design, so a redirect can never hide live content.Also check the Redirect Manager toggle is on, since turning it off keeps your rules but stops applying them.
Vulnerability scanners probing for other software. A 404 is the correct answer and nothing needs fixing. Add patterns to the ignore list to keep the log readable, and only act on URLs that used to exist on your site or that have real referrers.
That is what automatic slug redirects prevent. Add a redirect from the old URL now, and enable the Pro setting so it happens by itself next time.

AI and answer engines

Either nothing has crawled you yet, which is normal on a new or small site, or crawlers are blocked. Check that AI crawlers are allowed on the AI & GEO tab and that robots.txt does not block them.
Your pages are reachable but not being quoted. That is a content structure problem rather than a configuration one. Check the retrieval score on the pages you expected to be cited.
Check permalinks are not set to Plain, and that the llms.txt setting is on.
IndexNow reaches Bing, Yandex, and Seznam. Google does not take part, so a page not appearing in Google is not an IndexNow failure. Use the test submission button to confirm the key file is being served.

Notifications

Send a test from the Notifications tab. Mail on WordPress is configured outside Rankify and fails silently more often than anything else on a site. If the test does not arrive, the problem is your site’s mail configuration, not the plugin.
Raise the hit threshold, and add the noisy paths to the 404 ignore list.

Conflicts worth knowing about

Still stuck

What to include when you contact support.