Google Search Console: a practical guide to using it for SEO

Google Search Console is a free Google tool that shows how Google Search sees your website: which queries you appear for, how many people click through from the results, which pages are indexed and which technical issues hold your rankings back. It replaced Google Webmaster Tools, and any website that wants customers from Google should have it set up.

In brief:

• Search Console is free and measures what happens in Google Search before the click. What visitors do on your site is the job of Google Analytics 4.
• Create a Domain property verified via DNS: it covers all subdomains as well as http and https.
• The most valuable part is the Performance report: queries, clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for up to the last 16 months.
• Look for quick wins in queries ranking in positions 5–20 and in pages with plenty of impressions but few clicks.
• Check indexing, Core Web Vitals and any manual action or security messages regularly.

What Google Search Console is

Google Search Console (GSC for short, sometimes just Google Console) is a free Google service for monitoring and managing how your site appears in search results. In May 2015 Google renamed Google Webmaster Tools to Search Console, because business owners, marketers and developers use it as well as webmasters. Don't confuse it with Google Cloud Console, which manages Google's cloud services.

You don't need Search Console for your site to appear in Google. Without it, though, you can't see which words people use to find you, which pages Google has left out, how fast your site loads for real users or whether it has received a manual action.

What Search Console measures and what it doesn't

Search Console and Google Analytics 4 are often confused, but each answers a different question:

How to add your site to Google Search Console

Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google Account. First you choose a property type:

Our advice: create a Domain property, so you see data for the whole site at once, including the non-www and http versions. Add a URL-prefix property only if you want to track a section or a language folder separately.

Ownership verification methods

• DNS record: add a TXT record from Google with your domain provider. It is the only option for a Domain property, and the record can take two or three days to go live.
• HTML file: upload a verification file to the root of your site.
• HTML tag: a meta tag in the head section of your homepage; on WordPress, Yoast SEO and Rank Math have a field for it.
• Google Analytics: the GA tracking code in the head section plus edit rights in Analytics is enough.
• Google Tag Manager: you need Publish or Admin permission on the container, see our Google Tag Manager guide.

Don't remove the verification file, tag or record afterwards, or your permissions expire after a grace period. To give colleagues or an agency access, add them as full or restricted users under Settings → Users and permissions; don't share login details.

The Performance report: queries, clicks, impressions and position

Performance → Search results is the Google Search Console report you will open most. The default view covers three months and goes back up to 16 months. It works with four metrics:

Below the chart is a table with the Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search appearance and Dates tabs. Useful settings:

• Comparing periods: for example last month against the same month a year ago; the table adds a Difference column. Weekly or monthly granularity smooths out day-of-week swings, and the 24-hour view shows hourly data only a few hours old.
• Filters: query or URL containing or not containing a string, or matching a regular expression (RE2). Filters can be combined, but only one comparison can be active at a time.
• Branded queries: sites with enough impressions can separate queries containing the brand name; the classification may not always be accurate.
• Chart annotations: note what you changed on the site on a given date (up to 120 characters).

Since June 2026 Google has been gradually rolling out a report for generative AI features in Search (AI Overviews and AI Mode). For now it shows impressions only, with no clicks and no queries.

Other reports worth checking regularly

Page indexing

The Page indexing report shows how many URLs are in Google's index and why the others are not: robots.txt, noindex, a server or redirect error, soft 404, 404 or a duplicate. After a fix, click Validate fix; validation typically takes up to about two weeks. Not every URL needs to be indexed; what matters is your homepage, services, categories and products.

URL Inspection

The URL Inspection tool in the top bar shows whether a specific page is indexed, when Google last crawled it, which canonical URL it selected and whether robots.txt or noindex blocks indexing. After a major update you can click Request indexing; daily requests are limited and indexing is not guaranteed.

If you need a page out of the results quickly, the Removals tool hides it temporarily, for about six months. For permanent removal, delete it (404 or 410 status), password-protect it or add noindex.

Sitemaps

In the Sitemaps report you submit your sitemap URL, typically /sitemap.xml, and see whether Google fetched it without errors. Submitting doesn't guarantee every URL gets crawled, and only a property owner can do it. Our XML sitemap guide explains how to build one.

Core Web Vitals

The Core Web Vitals report rates page speed and stability using data from real users (CrUX), separately for mobile and desktop:

Smaller sites often have no data here because Google needs enough visits; PageSpeed Insights gives a rough picture instead. Google retired the separate Page Experience report at the end of 2024. For ways to speed up your site, see website speed and Core Web Vitals.

Security and manual actions

A manual action is issued when a human reviewer at Google finds pages breaking the spam policies, for example through bought links. Affected pages then rank lower or drop out of the results. Once all pages are fixed, you submit a review request in the Manual actions report explaining what you changed.

The Security issues report flags a hacked site, malware or phishing; Google may then show a warning next to your pages in the results. Deal with both immediately.

Links

The Links report shows your most linked pages, the sites that link to you most, the most common link text and, separately, internal links. It is a sample, with tables limited to 1,000 rows. Analysing competitors' links requires paid tools, see our overview of SEO tools.

Linking Search Console with Google Analytics 4

GA4 then shows search queries and organic Google traffic alongside on-site behaviour:

1. 1In GA4 open Admin → Product links → Search Console links and click Link.
2. 2Select a property where you are a verified owner (in GA4 you need the Editor role) and the web data stream.
3. 3In the Library, publish the Search Console collection.

A web data stream can be linked to only one Search Console property. Data appears in GA4 48 hours after Search Console collects it. Our Google Analytics 4 guide covers the tracking setup.

Quick wins: turning Search Console data into traffic

Traffic usually grows fastest on pages that Google already knows and shows. Where to start:

1. 1Queries in positions 5–20. In the Performance report turn on all metrics, sort the Queries tab by impressions and look for an average position of 5 to 20. The page needs little: a better answer to the query, sharper headings, more internal links.
2. 2Many impressions, few clicks. A page with a low click-through rate for its position needs a more compelling title and description, see on-page and off-page SEO.
3. 3Declining pages. Compare the last 28 days with the previous period and sort pages by the difference in clicks.
4. 4Customer questions. The regular expression ^(how|what|why|when|where) in the query filter reveals questions for an FAQ or an article.

A worked example (a fictitious online shop, not one of our clients): a garden furniture category has 12,000 impressions over three months, an average position of 7.8 and a CTR of 1.2%, i.e. 144 clicks. If a rewritten title and expanded copy lift CTR to 3%, the same impressions bring 360 clicks, 216 more without spending a euro on ads. Mark the change with a chart annotation.

Limitations to keep in mind

• 16 months of history: older data is gone; for longer series, export regularly, for example with the bulk data export to BigQuery.
• Anonymised queries: Google omits very rare queries from the table for privacy, and Search Console stores only the most important rows, so the rows don't add up to the total.
• Preliminary data: the newest figures still change; judge the impact of changes over weeks, not days.
• Google only: for Bing there is Bing Webmaster Tools, which can import sites from Search Console.

When to hand Search Console over to a specialist

Creating a property, verifying it and submitting a sitemap is something you can do yourself. Consider a specialist when Google traffic drops for no clear reason, Search Console reports hundreds of non-indexed pages, your site has received a manual action or you are moving to a new domain. A website SEO audit checks the overall state of your site.

At Weboptim, Search Console data is our starting point for SEO services: we build a content improvement plan from queries in positions 5–20 and track the results month by month.