How do I submit my website to Google?

You don't strictly have to: Google discovers most websites by following links from pages it already knows, and its own SEO starter guide says you usually need do nothing except publish the site. To speed things up and see what happens, add the site to Google Search Console, submit its sitemap, and request indexing for the home page. Then give it a week or more before judging.

Do I need to submit my site at all?

No. Google's guide to how Search works describes two ways it finds new pages: following links from known pages, and reading sitemaps that site owners submit. Most sites are found the first way. Submitting does not guarantee anything either, because Google does not promise to crawl, index or show any page. There is also no paid route: Google does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher.

Submitting is still worth the few minutes it takes. It shortens the wait for a site that nobody links to yet, and it gets you the reports that tell you whether Google is having trouble.

How to get a new website into Google

1. Make the site crawlable. Pages should load without a login, return a 200 status, and not carry a noindex tag. Check that robots.txt does not disallow the whole site, a common leftover from a staging server.
2. Add the site to Search Console and verify ownership. How do I add my website? walks through it.
3. Submit a sitemap in the Sitemaps report, so Google has a complete list of the pages you care about. See How do I submit a sitemap?.
4. Request indexing for the home page. Inspect the home page URL and click Request indexing; Google's missing-page guide recommends this for a new site.
5. Link every page from somewhere. Each page should be reachable from the home page through ordinary links, not only through search boxes or scripts.
6. Get mentioned elsewhere. A link from a site Google already crawls, such as a partner, a directory you belong to or your social profiles, is how Google finds most new sites.

How do I know it worked?

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. Results mean at least some pages are indexed; the count is only a rough guide. For exact answers, inspect individual URLs in Search Console, and open the Page indexing report after a week or so to see which pages are indexed and why others are not. Google's help says it can take a week or so before it starts crawling and indexing a new site. If nothing appears after that, read Why is my page not showing in Google?.

What about other search engines?

Search Console only covers Google. Bing has its own Bing Webmaster Tools, and Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and others accept IndexNow, a protocol for notifying them of new or changed URLs the moment you publish. Google is not among the engines that accept IndexNow, so you still need the steps above for Google. For everything else Search Console accepts, from removals to a change of address, see What can I submit to Google Search Console?.

How AutoPSEO helps

AutoPSEO can send your URLs to every IndexNow engine at once and keeps a log of what each submission returned (IndexNow). For Google, its Index Tracker inspects the pages you choose every day and records when each one first shows as indexed, so you can see a new site come into Google page by page.