How Google Finds Your Pages in the First Place

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Why this matters

Googlebot cannot crawl pages it does not know exist — URL discovery is the gate between your content and the index. Knowing the three discovery channels (sitemap submission, followed links, and manual fetch) lets you ensure every important page has a reliable path to being found.

Try it yourself

Navigate to Google Search Console → Sitemaps and verify your XML sitemap is submitted, has no errors, and shows a 'Discovered URLs' count close to your actual page count.
Pick a newly published page and check whether it appears as a linked destination in your internal link structure — use a site crawler like Screaming Frog free tier to confirm at least one internal link points to it.
Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to manually request indexing for that new page and record the response status and estimated timeline Google provides.

References

Google Search Central — Sitemaps Overview