Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the one report card written by the referee. It shows how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks your site, and how people find you, straight from Google's own systems. For any Google-specific question, its numbers outrank every third-party estimate, because they are not estimates.

Setting it up

Search Console is free and reports the data no external tool can truly see: your real Google impressions, clicks, positions, and index status. Before you read anything, verify the site the right way. You can add a Domain property, which covers every subdomain and both http and https under one roof and verifies through a DNS TXT record. Or you can add a URL-prefix property, which covers a single protocol and host only.

Prefer the Domain property for full coverage, so no traffic hides on a subdomain you forgot to add. The DNS TXT verification proves you control the whole domain, which is why it unlocks every subdomain and both protocols at once. A URL-prefix property verifies through an HTML file, a meta tag, an Analytics or Tag Manager snippet, or a DNS record, and each of those covers only that exact protocol and host. Keep one exception in mind: the disavow tool does not accept a Domain property, so if you ever need it you must also hold a URL-prefix property for that host. Set the Domain property up first and treat the URL-prefix one as a special-case add-on, not the default.

The Performance report

The Performance report is where most SEO decisions start. It gives four metrics. Impressions count how often a link to your site appeared in results. Clicks count how often someone clicked through. CTR is clicks divided by impressions. Average position is the average topmost rank where you appeared, and lower is better. You can slice all four by query, page, country, device, search appearance, and date, with up to 16 months of history.

Read it with the date control set to compare periods rather than as a single snapshot. Set Last 3 months against the prior period and you see direction: which queries are climbing, which are decaying. The search-appearance dimension splits out where you showed up, such as plain web results versus videos or other rich results, so you can tell which surfaces earn your clicks. The Pages tab shows which URLs pull the traffic, and clicking a page reveals the queries feeding it.

Two patterns pay off fast. Sort queries by impressions and find the ones with high impressions but low CTR: you already rank, so the fix is usually a sharper title or meta description, not new content. Then filter for average position 8 to 20. These are striking-distance terms, one page off the top results, where a modest content or internal-link push often moves you onto page one. Both moves come from data only Search Console has.

Indexing reports

A page Google will not index cannot rank, so the indexing side matters as much as the performance side. The Page Indexing report splits your URLs into indexed and not-indexed, and it names the reason for each not-indexed group: a stray noindex, blocked by robots.txt, a soft 404, a redirect, a server error, or the quality-driven Crawled - currently not indexed. Read that table sorted by count, fix the root cause, then use Validate fix. Managing which pages deserve to be indexed is its own discipline. Index management →

For a single URL, use URL Inspection. Paste a URL and it reports the last crawl, whether the URL is on Google, the Google-selected canonical, the rendered HTML, and which sitemaps reference it. Test Live URL confirms a fix in real time, and Request indexing queues a recrawl. Request indexing is rate-limited, so it is a nudge for a handful of important pages, not a bulk submission tool.

The rest of the toolbox

Several other reports earn regular checks. The Core Web Vitals report rates URL groups Poor, Needs improvement, or Good using CrUX field data, split by mobile and desktop over a 28-day rolling window, and scores each group by its weakest metric at the 75th percentile. Because the data is a rolling field average, validation takes weeks, not minutes. The Enhancements reports show one view per detected rich-result type, such as Breadcrumbs or Products, with valid, warning, and error items you confirm with the Rich Results Test. The Sitemaps report shows read status and lets you compare submitted against indexed counts.

A few areas are easy to misread. Removals only hides a URL temporarily, roughly six months, so it is not a way to keep a page out of the index for good. Security issues flags hacked-content and malware problems. The Linksreport is the ground truth for who links to you: top linked pages, top linking sites, and top linking text, straight from Google rather than a third-party crawl. Reading the Links report →

When a page vanishes from search, do not guess. Inspect the URL in Search Console and let Google tell you which stage failed. The tool that decides your fate also explains its verdict.

One area deserves special care. Manual actions lists human-applied penalties for policy violations, such as unnatural links, along with the path back through a reconsideration request. A clean Manual actions report is the baseline every other metric assumes. Manual actions and recovery → With Google's own tool mapped, the next move is to cover the other index that quietly feeds AI answers. Bing and IndexNow next →