This study focuses on the role played by search engines in accessing Salafi-jihadi terrorist content on the surface web and beyond. It argues that due to the very nature of the World Wide Web, search engines may be exploited as primary gateways to harmful content, allowing followers of Salafi-jihadi violent extremist groups to find and law enforcement to detect crucial communication channels maintained by terrorist organisations easily. While ‘findability’ has become a key concept in other fields that research how users locate material online, we point out that the obvious functionality of search engines has remained under the radar in the counterterrorism discourse for years, and this gap must now be addressed. In order to decrease the accessibility of terrorist-operated websites (TOWs) serving as the primary nodes that reroute traffic deeper into the ecosystems maintained by violent extremist organisations (VEOs), there is a role to be played by search engines. They dispose of a number of potential tools that can be exploited to limit the visibility of terrorist content on the surface web.