Find My AirPods doesn’t work

I recently tried to use find my AirPods and found it utterly useless. I hadn’t used them in a week and they didn’t even show up on the list of devices under ‘find my’ on my iPhone & iPad. Later on I found them on my own. They were still charged so that wasn’t the issue. I tried using ‘play sound’ from the Find My app and got nothing, despite the fact they were sitting next to me on the table. What’s the point of having AirPods on the find my app if it doesn’t work when you need it?