The Ultimate Guide to Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free Google service that reports how your site performs in Google Search. It shows which searches bring up your pages, which pages Google has indexed, which links point to your site, and which technical problems get in the way. Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, it covers Google Search only, so it complements an analytics tool rather than replacing one.

This guide covers two jobs: verifying your site, then reading the Performance, Page indexing, and Experience reports well enough to decide what to fix or write next.

What Can You Do With Google Search Console?

Search Console answers a handful of questions about your site, and each question has its own report:

• Which searches show my site, and how often do people click once they see it? The Performance report, which also splits the results by page, country, and device.
• Can Google index my pages? URL Inspection and Page indexing.
• Does Google have my sitemap? The Sitemaps report.
• Do my pages load well for real visitors, on both mobile and desktop? Core Web Vitals.
• Has Google flagged a penalty or a security problem? Manual actions and Security issues.
• Who links to my site? The Links report.

Other questions land in less obvious places. Devices and countries are tabs inside Performance, referring domains live in Links, and what older tools called crawl errors now appears in Page indexing and Crawl stats.

Setting Up the Search Console

Search Console shows data about your own site, so Google asks you to prove you own it before it shows anything. That proof is called verification. Tools such as Semrush can show data about competitors’ sites, but Search Console cannot. To begin, open the property selector at the top left of the screen and choose Add property.

Google then asks which kind of property you want, and your choice decides which verification methods you can use.

Add a website is the path this guide follows. Under it, a New group lists Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. Those are platform properties, covered after the user permissions below.

Domain Property Versus URL Prefix Property

A Domain property covers everything under a domain: www and non-www, http and https, and every subdomain. A URL prefix property covers only the exact address you enter, including its protocol, so the http and https versions of a site are two separate properties. Choose Domain whenever you can, because it is the standard. A URL prefix property for the main site would leave out a subdomain such as help.elegantthemes.com, which would need a property of its own. Choose URL prefix only when a real blocker stands in the way, such as having no DNS access or needing just one address.

Verification Methods

A Domain property verifies through DNS only. Add the TXT record Google gives you at your domain name provider or host, then select Verify. Leave the record in place afterward, because verification lasts only while the token stays valid. If you have never edited DNS, this introduction to the Domain Name System explains where records live, and your host’s support can walk you through its own dashboard.

A URL prefix property offers more methods: upload an HTML file to your site, add an HTML tag to the <head> of your home page, connect an existing Google Analytics account, connect a Google Tag Manager container, or use the domain name provider method. Each one depends on the access you have, as the chooser below shows.

Adding Users and Permissions

An owner can give other people access from Settings. Enter their email address, choose a permission level, and they see the property’s data under their own Google account, so nobody shares a login. Give each person the lowest level that lets them do their job, whether they are a developer, a writer, or a client. Only the owner has access to the API, but even standard access is enough to connect the property to external tools such as SEOgets or SEOstack, so most people on your team never need ownership to use their data.

Platform Properties for Social and Video Accounts

Google introduced platform properties in July 2026. Each one connects a single Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube account, and no website is needed. Choose the platform in the Add property dialog, follow the on-screen steps to authorize the account, and expect data to start arriving within about 48 hours.

A platform property does not add social data to your website’s reports. It is a separate property with its own reports, and what it measures is how your posts and videos perform in Google, not on the platform:

• Performance: clicks, impressions, and the queries that surface your posts or videos in Google Search, Discover, and Google News, filterable by country, post, and date range.
• Insights: a simpler summary of recent traffic trends, your top posts, and how people find your account through Google, with queries sorted into top, trending up, and trending down.
• Achievements: milestones such as reaching a new click threshold within the last 28 days.

The enrichment is in what the queries tell you. A website’s Performance report shows which searches lead to your pages, and a platform property shows which searches lead to your posts, so you learn which topics people look for before you plan the next post or video. Platform views do not include native numbers such as views, likes, or watch time, so keep each platform’s own analytics beside it. Google’s guide suggests exporting each property’s data to a spreadsheet to compare the platforms and your website on the same metrics, because Search Console does not roll properties up into one view. A playlist row reports the playlist page, not the videos inside it.

Understanding the Basic Dashboard

The Overview page opens first. It summarizes the health of your property with sections for Performance, Indexing, Experience, and Enhancements, and it surfaces any manual action or security issue.

Right below Overview in the sidebar, Insights gives a simpler view of the same data. It summarizes how your content performs, which pages are new, and where visitors come from, in plain cards that suit a client or a teammate who will never open the Performance report.

Every other report lives in the left sidebar, which sorts the reports into groups. Expand each group to see the reports inside it.

Here is what each group answers:

• Overview: the health of the property at a glance.
• Insights: a plain-language summary of how your content performs.
• Performance: traffic from Search results, Discover, and Google News, with filters for query, page, country, and device.
• Generative AI: a Beta report nested under Performance that shows how often your pages appear in Google’s AI features.
• URL inspection: the indexing status of one page.
• Indexing: Pages, Sitemaps, and Removals.
• Experience: Core Web Vitals and HTTPS.
• Enhancements: structured data and rich result reports.
• Security and Manual Actions: penalties for breaking Google’s spam policies, and hacking or malware that Google finds on the site.
• Links: who links to you and how your pages link to each other.
• Settings: property settings, users, and Crawl stats.

Reports that appear in older screenshots around the web may be gone. Coverage became Page indexing, and Speed became Core Web Vitals. Mobile Usability, the Page experience report, International Targeting, and the sitelinks search box have been removed, and Google retired the URL Parameters tool in April 2022.

The Performance Report

The Performance report shows how your site appears in Google Search. It opens on the past three months of data, and the sidebar lists Search results, Discover, and Google News beneath it.

The Four Metrics

Four tiles run across the top of the report, and each one can be turned on or off:

• Total clicks: the number of times people clicked through to your site from Google Search results.
• Total impressions: the number of times your site appeared in results, whether or not anyone clicked.
• Average CTR: clicks divided by impressions. A high rate on a handful of branded queries says little, so check it across many queries and pages.
• Average position: the average position of the topmost result from your site, calculated for each row of whichever dimension you have selected. A site-wide total blends every query, so it shows a direction more than a ranking.

The chart plots the tiles that are on, and the table below it breaks the same numbers down by query, page, country, and device.

Clicks fall quickly down the page, so position has a large effect on traffic. Backlinko’s study of about 4 million Google results, updated in April 2025, found an average click-through rate of 27.6% at position 1, about 10.1% at position 2, and about 7.2% at position 3.

AI Overviews are, however, eating into every position’s clicks and is a new reality for SEOs

Tabs, Filters, and Compare

Under the chart, the table has six tabs: Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search appearance, and Dates. Queries lists the searches that showed your site, and Pages lists the URLs that appeared. Mine the Queries tab for related topics that tie back to your cornerstone articles, since those searches already bring people to you.

A search type filter switches between web, image, video, and news results. Filters stack, so you can look at one page’s queries on mobile in one country.

Comparison Windows

The date buttons offer 24 hours, 7 days, 28 days, and 3 months, and More opens a Date range dialog with two tabs. Filter offers the last 6, 12, or 16 months and a custom start and end date. Compare sets two periods side by side, and the table then shows each row’s change in clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. Pick the window that fits the question:

• Last 28 days against the previous 28 days: the routine check, since every period holds the same number of weekdays.
• The past three months against the previous period: the best view of a slow decline.
• Last 12 months against the previous year: removes seasonality, which suits a shop or a travel site.
• A custom range around a known date, such as a core update, a redesign, or a migration, against the same length of time before it.

Sort the compared table by the change in clicks to put the biggest losers and gainers at the top.

Query and Page Filters for Long-Tail Searches

The Query and Page filters each accept a match type, and the one worth learning is Custom (regex). A regular expression lets one filter catch a whole family of searches. Add the filter, choose Queries matching regex, and try these:

• Long-tail queries: ^(\S+\s){5,}\S+$ keeps only searches of six words or more. Long queries are specific, face less competition, and often come from people ready to act.
• Questions: ^(who|what|why|how|when|where|which|can|does|is|are)\b lists the searches phrased as questions, which are ready-made headings and FAQ entries.
• One section of the site: filter Page by URL contains /blog/ to see how the blog performs apart from product pages.
• Your brand: use the branded queries filter below, or Queries not matching regex with your brand name, to see what people find without already knowing you.

Combine them: a long-tail filter on the Queries tab, plus a page filter for one article, shows every specific question that article already answers. Anything with impressions and an average position past 10 is a candidate for a new section or a new post.

Two newer features save time. The branded queries filter separates searches that include your brand name from everything else, on eligible sites. AI-powered configuration turns a plain-language request into a set of filters in the Search results report.

Exporting Search Console Data

The Export button at the top right of a Performance report downloads the table in the view you are looking at, as a CSV file, an Excel file, or a Google Sheet. Because it exports whatever the filters show, the filtered view is the more useful one. Apply the long-tail regex filter from above, add a page filter for one article, and the export becomes a list of specific topics that article could cover next.

For a sitewide export, clear every filter, open the Pages or Queries tab, and export. The interface caps an export at 1,000 rows, so a large site gets only its top rows. Google’s Search Analytics API returns up to 50,000 rows per day for each search type, and its bulk data export sends the full dataset to BigQuery.

That limit is why API-based tools exist. SEOgets and SEOstack pull from the API, which lets through far more rows than the interface shows, and they store the data themselves, so your history is not limited to the 16 months that Search Console keeps. Other site owners send the bulk export to BigQuery and visualize it in Looker Studio, where it can be blended with GA4, Google Ads, and Bing data. Search Console data is first-party data about your own audience, and your competitors cannot get it.

Three Jobs for Performance Data

Most of the value comes from three repeatable checks:

1. Find queries close to page one. Turn on the Average position tile, sort the Queries tab by position, and look for queries between positions 8 and 20 that already have impressions. A stronger page or one more internal link may be enough to reach page one.
2. Find pages with a low click-through rate. Sort the Pages tab by impressions and look for pages with many impressions and few clicks. Rewriting the title tag and meta description is the first fix, because both appear in the result.
3. Find pages that are losing clicks. Compare the last three months with the previous period, then check which pages dropped. Inspect each one in URL Inspection for an indexing problem, then refresh its content.

What Each Position Band Calls For

Average position tells you which of those jobs applies:

• Positions 1 to 3: protect the page, and rewrite its title and meta description if the click-through rate is low.
• The rest of page one (4 to 10): look for ways to match the query more fully.
• Striking distance (11 to 20): add depth and internal links.
• 21 and beyond: check indexing first, then consider an archive update and an SEO audit.

The Discover Tab

Some properties show a Discover report under Performance. Google says it appears only when your data reaches a minimum threshold of impressions, and Google publishes no number for it. The report covers the last 16 months.

The Discover report matches the Search results report, but it counts only impressions and clicks from Google’s Discover feed.

This site has had no news driven impressions or clicks in the last 3 months

Discover traffic is less predictable than search traffic. For images, Google recommends at least 1,200 px wide, over 300,000 total pixels, with 16:9 preferred, and large image previews enabled with the max-image-preview:large setting. Make sure your major pages are indexed too, which the next section covers.

The Generative AI Report

Google added a Generative AI item under Performance, which Google announced in June 2026. The report opens as Generative AI features, is marked Beta, and has the same date buttons, Search type filter, and Add filter control as the other Performance reports. It counts how often your pages appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Discover, and it breaks the count down by page, country, device, and date. Treat it as a visibility measure: the report shows impressions, not clicks, so it says that Google used your page and not how many visitors it sent. A companion Search generative AI control lets a site owner opt content out of those features.

URL Inspection

URL Inspection is a separate tool, not a part of Performance. Paste a full page address into the search bar at the top of the screen, or select the inspect link beside a URL in a report. It checks one URL at a time, so enter the exact page you want to check.

The result says whether the URL is on Google, how Google found it, such as a sitemap or a referring page, and when it was last crawled. It also shows the canonical URL Google selected and any structured data it found. It does not check quality guidelines, manual actions, or security issues.

Test live URL fetches the page right now, and View crawled page shows what Google stored. After a major edit, select Request Indexing to ask Google to crawl the page again. Each property has a daily quota, indexing typically takes a day or so and sometimes much longer, and a request guarantees nothing. Requesting indexing is not the same as ranking, and for many URLs a sitemap is the better route. Our guide to getting indexed by Google covers the wider picture.

The Page Indexing Report

Reading the Report

The Page indexing report, under Indexing and then Pages, shows how many known URLs are Indexed and how many are Not indexed. A graph tracks the totals over time, and a table lists each Not indexed reason with its count.

Select a reason to see a sample of the affected URLs.

A Not indexed URL is not always a problem. A WordPress site creates some addresses that should stay out of the index, such as pages marked noindex and duplicates that point to another canonical version. The test is whether a reason applies to pages you want people to find.

Which Reasons Need Action

Google names the reasons in the table: server error (5xx), redirect error, blocked by robots.txt, noindex, soft 404, 401, 404, 403, and other 4xx errors, Crawled – currently not indexed, Discovered – currently not indexed, and duplicate or alternate pages. Treat a reason as a problem when it hits a page you want in search results.

A server error, a redirect error, or a soft 404 on such a page points to a fix on your site. Blocked by robots.txt and noindex are correct on pages you hid on purpose, and mistakes on pages you did not. A 404 is expected for pages you deleted. The two currently not indexed reasons mean Google knows the URL but has not indexed it, so improve the page and link to it from related pages.

Validating a Fix

After you fix an issue, open it and select Validate fix. Google rechecks the affected URLs, which can take up to about two weeks. An issue leaves the report 90 days after its last instance clears.

Sitemaps and Removals

Creating a Sitemap

A sitemap is a file that lists the URLs you want Google to find. It is optional: Google says a site of about 500 pages or fewer that is fully linked from its home page may skip it. Pages that no internal link points to are easy to miss, and a sitemap tells Google they exist. One sitemap holds up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed, and a sitemap index file can list up to 50,000 sitemaps.

WordPress creates a basic sitemap at wp-sitemap.xml, and SEO plugins such as Yoast replace it with their own at sitemap_index.xml. In Yoast, go to Yoast SEO > Settings > Site features and find XML sitemaps under Technical SEO. Our list of sitemap plugins compares the options, and the Yoast SEO setup guide covers the rest of the plugin.

Submitting a Sitemap

Open Sitemaps under Indexing, paste the sitemap URL into Add a new sitemap, and select Submit. Our guide to submitting a sitemap to Search Console walks through the steps in more detail.

The report lists only sitemaps submitted there or through the API, not ones Google found in your robots.txt file. Each sitemap shows a status of Success, Has errors, or Couldn’t fetch. For a deeper look at limits and setup, see our guide to XML sitemaps and SEO.

Removing URLs With Google Search Console

Removals, also under Indexing, hides a URL from Google Search results for about six months. It does not delete the page, and Google keeps crawling it. Only property owners can use it. The tool also has tabs for clearing a cached URL, outdated content, and SafeSearch filtering. Use it for pages exposed by accident and for outdated URLs. Copyright takedown requests go through Google’s legal removal request tools instead.

For a lasting removal, change the page itself: delete it so it returns a 404 or 410, add a noindex tag, or put it behind a password. Visitors who follow old links to a deleted page land on your 404 page, so make that page useful.

Experience and Enhancements

The Experience group holds the Core Web Vitals and HTTPS reports, and Enhancements sits beneath it with the structured data reports.

Core Web Vitals

The Core Web Vitals report groups your URLs by three measurements of real visits: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) for how fast the main content loads, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) for how fast the page responds, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for how much the layout jumps. The data is field data from real Chrome users, reported separately for mobile and desktop.

LCP is good at 2.5 seconds or less and poor over 4 seconds, while INP is good at 200 milliseconds or less and poor over 500. CLS is good at 0.1 or less and poor over 0.25. A group of URLs shows only when Google has enough data for it.

Desktop data may not show when too few desktop visitors reach the site.

Field data describes real visitors, while lab tools test one page in a controlled setup, so the two often differ. PageSpeed Insights shows both for a single URL, and Lighthouse lets you test a change before visitors see it.

Enhancements

Each Enhancements report covers one structured data feature that Google finds on your pages, such as breadcrumbs, products, or videos. A report appears only when Google finds that markup, and it flags the pages with errors so you can fix them.

Security and Manual Actions

Manual actions and Security issues are two separate reports, and both should read No issues detected. A manual action means a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on your site do not follow its spam policies. If you see one, fix the pages it names and submit a reconsideration request. A site that avoids spam techniques is unlikely to see one.

Security issues reports hacking and malware that Google detects on your site. If one appears, clean the site first, then ask Google to review it.

Settings, Crawl Stats, and Links

Crawl Stats

Crawl stats lives under Settings. It is available for root-level properties, meaning a Domain property or a URL prefix property at the root of the site, and it covers the last 90 days. The report shows total crawl requests, total download size, and average response time, with breakdowns by response code, file type, crawl purpose, and Googlebot type. It is aimed at very large sites, so on a small site a quick look for spikes in server errors is enough.

Google removed its crawl rate limiter tool, so slowing Googlebot down now means returning 503 or 429 responses for a while. Our guide to advanced SEO techniques covers the larger crawling picture.

The Links Report

The Links report lists external links to your site: top linked pages, top linking sites, and top linking text. It also lists internal links, as top linked pages. Google shows a sample of links rather than every one. Each table shows up to 1,000 rows, and you can export up to 100,000 rows to a CSV file or Google Sheets.

Top Linked Pages

The external Top linked pages table shows which of your pages other sites link to most. Home pages and top-level pages usually lead. Pages that earn links are the ones worth keeping accurate and well linked inside your site.

Select any row to see the sites that link to that page.

Top Linking Sites and Text

The Top linking sites table shows who links to you most. The list hints at what people say about your content and where relationships could bring more backlinks.

Top linking text shows the anchor text other sites use when they link to you. Topics that appear there often make good ideas for new content.

What to Check and How Often

Google suggests checking Search Console about once a month, and again after you change the site. A short routine covers the essentials:

• Performance: compare the last three months with the previous period, then work through the three jobs above.
• Page indexing: look for new Not indexed reasons on pages you want found.
• Sitemaps: confirm the status is Success.
• Core Web Vitals: watch for groups of URLs that moved from good to poor.
• Manual actions and Security issues: confirm both show no issues.

Search Console is not analytics. It has no time on site, no behavior after the click, and no data from other search engines or from competitors. It is not a rank tracker either, because average position blends every impression Google recorded. Pair it with an analytics tool, and use a tool such as Semrush if you want competitor data.

Once the reports show what to fix, an SEO audit turns the findings into a work plan, and the cornerstone guide above helps you choose which pages to strengthen first.