Your Cloud Run Site Still Won't Show Up on Google? The Apex Domain Mapping I Missed
The site runs on GCP Cloud Run with its own custom domain, and on-site SEO had been applied as thoroughly as possible — yet it barely appeared in Google search. The cause turned out to be that Cloud Run's custom domain mappings only covered the www subdomain; the bare domain had no mapping, so requests to it never reached the site. The fix is to add a mapping with the subdomain field left empty, add all the A / AAAA records Cloud Run provides (about eight) at お名前.com, and wait for DNS and the HTTPS certificate to take effect. This article explains why that step affects indexing, and what it does and doesn't solve.
Your Cloud Run Site Still Won't Show Up on Google? The Apex Domain Mapping I Missed
A confusing symptom
The site is deployed on GCP Cloud Run and bound to its own custom domain. Yet when I searched Google, my site barely showed up.
Before touching any configuration, I had already reviewed everything I could do on the site itself and applied on-page SEO as thoroughly as possible. It made no difference to the search results. That suggests the problem wasn't the page content itself, but something further upstream: whether search engines can actually reach the site at all.
The cause: www was mapped, the bare domain wasn't
Open Cloud Run's "Custom domain mappings" (network mappings) in the GCP Console, and you'll find an easy-to-miss asymmetry:
www.yourdomainhad a mapping configured.yourdomain— the bare domain, the top-level domain without www — had nothing configured.
That was the problem. Visitors and external links often use the bare domain without www. If that domain isn't mapped to the service, requests never reach the site. From a search engine's point of view, links pointing at the bare domain simply don't open, so there is nothing to index.
The fix: add a mapping with the subdomain field left empty
The fix isn't complicated; the key is to leave the "subdomain" field blank:
- On the Cloud Run mappings page, click "Add mapping."
- When asked to specify a subdomain, enter nothing — leaving it empty maps the bare domain itself.
- Cloud Run then lists the DNS records you need. Add every A / AAAA record it provides (about eight in total) to お名前.com exactly as shown.
- When adding the bare-domain record at お名前.com, the "hostname" (ホスト名) is normally left blank. Confirm the final display shows
vibecodingjapan.com, and enter TYPE and VALUE as Cloud Run shows them.
Wait for DNS and the certificate to take effect
Adding the records doesn't make the site live immediately. DNS has to propagate, and the HTTPS certificate has to be signed and issued. According to Google, the certificate usually takes about 15 minutes, and in the worst case up to 24 hours.
During that window it's normal for the setup to look like it "isn't working," so there's no need to keep changing it. Once it takes effect, check that the bare domain opens correctly.
What this fixes — and what it doesn't
To be clear: filling in the bare-domain mapping fixes a precondition — whether the site can be reached at all. That's one necessary condition for being indexed, but not a sufficient one. If the bare domain doesn't open, both search engines and users fail at the very first step. Once the mapping is in place, content quality, backlinks, and site structure still matter as before.
Put more precisely: when your on-site SEO is already thorough and you still can't be found, it's worth checking this most basic question of reachability before piling on more page-level optimizations.