Family Tree in Google Search results
Why does the Family Tree doesn't show up in Google Search results like for example Geneanet? Has Familysearch forbidden Google to index the tree? It would be good for someone who doesn't have an account yet to see whether their ancestors are in the Tree or not.
Answers
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Google does indeed index ancestor pages for Family Tree and they do show up in Google search results. For example, when I do a Google search for "Sidney James Ottley" I see his FamilySearch profile listed as the second result. Note that the result is for
https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KWCV-R1L/sidney-james-ottley-1890-1982
The pages that are indexed by Google are those public pages that have URLs that start with ancestors.familysearch.org. Those public pages can be seen without signing in to FamilySearch. Even without an account, you can navigate among the related profiles (always staying within the public ancestors.familysearch.org part of the site).
Not all Family Tree profiles have had a public page created yet, which might explain why @Loïc Baert thought that Family Tree results don't appear in Google search results, when millions of profiles do. And even if the public page exists, how high it might appear in the results for a particular search depends on the particular search criteria and other competing search hits that would affect the ranking. It also seems to take some time for a new profile to have its corresponding public page created, so some patience may be required.
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Thank you for the explanation and the example. Do you need to create a public page manually?
The birth and death place on such public page are mentioned in the brief life history. Are they mentioned in another part of the page?
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Some public pages for my immediate family show up in a Google or DuckDuckGo search. My process is the same for all the family members: I haven't done anything different for those profiles.
Many of my family's profiles were badly edited late in 2025, when a malicious user targeted my family. Many names were edited to nonsense or duplicates created. They were repaired before the end of 2025. Those names don't show up in a Google search. That may be an indicator of how long it takes for those pages to be made available in a Google search.
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Does it also maybe depend on the country of the ancestor?
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Had to pull out a vague memory, but I seemed to recall that if you would like to have pages public so that you can refer relatives that do not want FamilySearch accounts to them, then you could force creation of such. I tested this and it seems to work.
First, I tried to find a profile I have been working on that did not have a page. And as far as I can tell was successful.
Then I entered in my browser https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/ then pasted the person's ID number at the end of that. And the page for person who I could not find appeared. And from there you can go to any family member.
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So if I understand it correctly from @Gordon Collett it is something that is not automatically created. Wouldn't it be better if all person pages have a public counterpart (except the living profiles of course)?
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I suspect it is a combination of automatic and requested. Certainly the initial construction of the directory of public pages was automated routine.
Since I have no connection with FamilySearch I really have no idea why all profiles do not have a public page and can only speculate. But when has that stopped me?
I think the first thing to do is consider what the purpose of these ancestors public pages might be. After all, FamilySearch users don't need them, people not interested in FamilySearch don't need them, and the pages themselves really don't give all that much information and for most of the items you can click on to view more about, you have to create a FamilySearch account or sign in if you already have one to see more. So people that do come to one of these pages and are interested enough to want to learn all they can about the family will create an account and then never need the page again.
So potentially this was a campaign to attract new users. If it was never really successful, repeatedly scanning through the entire FamilyTree database and updating the directory for the feature would probably not be worth the processing power and computer resources this would take. Why maintain a feature that no one is using and is not fulfilling its intended purpose?
As a side note, the page I created as explained above does now appear when I search for him on the Ancestors starting page, but he still does not appear in a Google search for him even if I use the site specific search: "site:https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en gundar haugland" I'll have to check periodically and see how long it takes for Google to add this page to their search results.
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@Gordon Collett prompted us:
"… I think the first thing to do is consider what the purpose of these ancestors public pages might be…"
I'm only working on what I read above, but I do wonder if someone got cold feet about automatically dumping extracts of all FamilySearch's profiles into Google?
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Many community members notice that Google results only show a small portion of FamilySearch content. This is expected behavior. Only the publicly accessible parts of FamilySearch can be indexed by external search engines, and a lot of records and Family Tree profiles are not publicly available.
FamilySearch restricts access to many collections due to privacy laws, contractual agreements with record custodians, and the need to protect sensitive information. Anything behind a login or governed by usage restrictions cannot be indexed by Google or other search engines. In addition, Google limits how many results from a single website appear on each results page, which can make it seem as though fewer pages exist.
If you are searching for historical records or specific individuals, the most complete results will always come from using FamilySearch’s internal search tools rather than relying on Google.
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@sc woz , the discussion here is specifically about finding the completely public facing FS Ancestors pages in Google including what determines whether any one profile has an Ancestors page, whether all Ancestors pages have been indexed by Google, how long it takes a newly user generated Ancestors page to get indexed by Google, and whether these Ancestors pages are even an active product any more.
For example, If I do a google site specific search for John, that is, I put:
»»» site:https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en john
in my browser search bar (This is not a link. This is two search parameters and there really is a space between the site parameter and the name parameter), I get 31 pages of results that are all Ancestors pages for Johns. But there are certainly far, far more Johns in Family Tree than these.
Here is the first portion of the first page of results:
@sc woz , do you have any contacts at FamilySearch that might have more information about the above questions?
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