Tools & Data
What Is Google Search Console?
Google's own reporting on how a site appears in Search, including the only first party view of impressions, clicks and indexing decisions.
Definition
Google Search Console is a free service from Google that reports how a site performs in Google Search and how Google crawls and indexes it. It requires verified ownership of the property, and it is the only source of first party data on queries, impressions, indexing status and crawl behaviour.
The reports that carry the most information
- Performance: queries, pages, countries and devices with clicks, impressions, CTR and position
- Page indexing: which URLs are indexed and the specific reason any are not
- URL Inspection: what Google has stored for one URL, including the rendered HTML
- Crawl Stats: request volume, response codes and average response time over time
- Core Web Vitals: field data grouped into good, needs improvement and poor
- Enhancements: structured data types detected and any errors in them
Limits worth knowing before you rely on it
Performance data is sampled and filtered. Queries that are rare enough to be identifying are omitted, so the sum of query rows will not match the site total. Position is an average, which mixes very different results. The default window is three months and export is capped, which is why teams often pipe the data into a warehouse through the API or the BigQuery bulk export.
Generative AI reporting
Search Console now reports on generative AI features, so traffic arriving through AI experiences can be distinguished from classic results. Google has also added a control that lets an owner decide whether the site appears in those features.
Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site's Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.