Google Search Console

Search Console reports what Google sees, not what visitors do once they arrive. It tells you which searches showed your pages, how often people clicked and whether Google could crawl and index each URL. Behaviour on the site itself, such as which pages people read or which forms they sent, belongs to an analytics tool like Google Analytics 4.

It is also the only place Google tells you directly about problems with your site: pages left out of the index, security issues and manual actions taken by its spam team. Nothing in it changes your rankings. It is a window, not a control panel.

How it works

You add your site as a property and prove you own it, usually with a DNS record, which covers every subdomain and protocol, or with an HTML tag or file on a single URL prefix. Google starts collecting data for a property as soon as anyone adds it, even before verification, and not before, so it pays to set it up before you need it.

The Performance report lists queries, pages, countries and devices with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, kept for 16 months. The Page indexing report and the URL Inspection tool explain why a given URL is or is not in Google's index, and the Sitemaps report shows whether Google read your sitemap.

To check a site yourself, start with three places. In the Page indexing report, read the reasons pages are not indexed and open the examples for any that matter. In the Performance report, compare the last three months with the same period a year earlier, which separates seasonal dips from real losses. Then open Manual actions and Security issues, which should both report that no issues were detected. Owners can add other people as users with full or restricted permissions, so nobody needs to share a password.

Example

A physiotherapy clinic launches a new page for sports injuries and, after two weeks, cannot find it in Google. URL Inspection shows the page as discovered but not yet indexed. The owner adds links to it from the homepage and the services page and requests indexing, and soon the page appears in the Performance report with its first impressions for local injury searches.

Later, the same report shows the page at an average position of around 15 for its main query, with impressions but few clicks. That tells the owner the page sits on the second page of results for most of those searches. Rewriting the title to name the injuries and the town, and linking to the page from a popular blog post, moves it closer to the first page over the next couple of months.

Why it matters for your business

Search Console is free and is the most direct evidence you have of how Google treats your site. Without it, a broken redirect, an accidental noindex tag or a hacked page can quietly cost leads for months before anyone notices. The trade-off is time: the reports reward someone checking them monthly, and the data covers Google only, so it says nothing about Bing or AI assistants. Linking Search Console to Google Analytics puts search queries next to what visitors then did on the site, which makes both easier to read.

Common mistakes

• Verifying only one version of the site, such as the www address, and missing data for the others.
• Reading average position as the ranking for one keyword, when it is an average across every query and impression.
• Treating every page listed as not indexed as a problem, when many are duplicates or redirects Google is right to leave out.
• Setting it up only after traffic drops, when there is no earlier data to compare against.

Questions people ask

Is Google Search Console free?

Yes. Google Search Console costs nothing and has no paid tier. You need a Google account and the ability to prove you own the site, usually by adding a DNS record at your domain provider or placing a small tag or file on the website.

What is the difference between Search Console and Google Analytics?

Search Console shows what happens before the click: the searches your pages appeared for, how often they were clicked and whether Google can index them. Google Analytics shows what visitors do after they arrive, from every source, not only Google. Most sites benefit from both, and the two can be linked.

How long does Search Console take to show data?

Performance data usually appears within a few days of adding the property and then updates with a delay of a couple of days. Collection starts when the property is added, even before verification, so data from before that point is not available. Indexing reports can take longer to fill in for a new site.