I spent months optimizing pages Google didn't even know existed (so I built a tool to fix it)

Really dumb realization on my end, but hoping it saves someone here a few months of wasted effort. A while back I was trying to grow a project and doing all the standard stuff. Writing what I thought was decent content, running through the on-page checklist, trying to get links. But a huge chunk of my pages were just sitting at flat zero traffic. No impressions, nothing. I kept rewriting titles and tweaking copy, assuming I was just getting out-muscled by bigger sites. Then I finally checked the one thing I should have checked on day one: were the pages even indexed? They weren't. Not position 80, just literally not in Google's database. I was spending weeks trying to rank pages that search engines didn't even know existed. Once I actually forced Google to crawl them, they started getting the traffic I expected. It turns out "publish and wait" doesn't really work anymore, especially for newer domains. I got super paranoid after that and started manually checking every single URL I had in a massive spreadsheet, pasting them one by one to see what was actually live. I had friends doing the same thing. It took hours and it was miserable. So I ended up building a tool just to automate that manual spreadsheet process. It's called SEO Chex. It's not overly complicated—you drop a URL in, and it gives you a hard yes/no on whether it's actually in Google. Then it mass-submits it to Google, Bing, Yandex, etc. The main reason I built it was for the monitoring, tbh. Instead of me checking back manually, it keeps pinging Google over the next few days and resubmits if the page drops out or gets stuck. I also added a feature that analyzes pages that absolutely refuse to index and suggests meta/body tweaks to unstick them. I know how this sub operates, so to be 100% clear: this is not some magic tool that guarantees #1 rankings. It just guarantees you actually get in the door so your other SEO work actually matters. Mostly just wanted to share the lesson, because I see a lot of founders here agonizing over why their content marketing isn't working, and honestly half the time, Google hasn't even seen the page yet. Do the dumb check first.