Google Search Console is a free service from Google that shows how your website appears in Google Search. It reports which searches show your pages, how often people click, which pages Google has indexed and why others were left out. It is the only place Google tells you directly about problems with your site, including penalties.
Proving you own the site
Before you see any data you add a property and verify it. A Domain property covers every subdomain and both http and https, and is verified by adding a TXT record at your DNS provider. A URL-prefix property covers one exact address such as https://www.example.com/ and can be verified with an HTML file, a meta tag, or an existing Google Analytics or Tag Manager setup. The Domain option is usually the better choice when you can edit DNS.
The reports worth knowing
- Performance: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, filterable by query, page, country and device. Up to 16 months of history.
- URL Inspection: how Google sees one page, whether it is indexed, the canonical it chose, and a button to request indexing.
- Pages (indexing): indexed and not-indexed URLs with reasons such as "Crawled, currently not indexed" or "Duplicate without user-selected canonical".
- Sitemaps: where you submit your XML sitemap and see if it was read.
- Core Web Vitals: field speed and stability results grouped by URL.
- Manual actions and Security issues: penalties from reviewers and hacked-site warnings.
An everyday use
A landscaping company sees in the Performance report that a page about drought-tolerant planting gets thousands of impressions for "low water garden ideas" but almost no clicks, at an average position of 9. Rewriting the title tag to match that phrase and adding a short answer near the top is a targeted, low-effort change. Weeks later the same report shows whether clicks moved.
Search Console or Google Analytics?
Search Console covers what happens before the click, on Google's results page. Google Analytics covers what visitors do after arriving, from any source. The two can be linked so GA4 shows Search Console query data in its reports.
Mistakes people make with Search Console
- Setting it up only after a problem. History starts when you verify, so add it on launch day.
- Clicking "Request indexing" over and over. It does not speed things up beyond the first request.
- Reading average position as a rank. It is averaged over every query and impression, so it moves when your mix of queries changes.
- Panicking over every excluded URL. Redirects and intentional noindex pages are supposed to be excluded.
Related terms
- Google Analytics: on-site behaviour after the click.
- Indexing: what the Pages report tracks.
- XML sitemap: submitted here to guide crawling.
- Core Web Vitals: the speed scores it reports.