Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool provided by Google that lets site owners monitor how their site appears in Google Search. Unlike third-party SEO tools that infer data from crawls and estimates, Search Console reports what Google actually sees. This includes which pages it has indexed, what queries triggered impressions, and what errors it encountered.

Coming from Google does not make it infallible, and two separate faults have distorted its impression data inside the last two years (see when Search Console’s data was wrong below). It remains the best source available. It is not a source you should read without knowing where the joins are.

It is not optional. Every site should be verified in Search Console before launch and checked regularly throughout its life. For setup instructions and verification options, see the How to Use Google Search Console guide.

Performance

The Performance report shows how your site appears in Google Search results: clicks, impressions, average position, and CTR. Filter by:

• Query. What people searched for when your pages appeared.
• Page. Which URLs are driving search traffic.
• Country. Geographic breakdown.
• Search type. Separate data for web, image, video, and news results. Web splits into text-based and multimodal, the second covering searches made with an image through Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads or Chrome’s “Search this image”; multimodal carries no query data.¹

AI Overviews and AI Mode data is included within the standard Web search type. A separate Search Generative AI Performance report (see below) shows impressions from AI features as a distinct view. It carries no clicks, so a falling CTR trend with stable impressions remains the primary signal that an AI feature is absorbing them.

Use the Performance report to find: high-impression, low-CTR pages (title/description problem); pages dropping in position (a ranking issue to investigate); and queries you didn’t expect to rank for (content opportunities). A custom annotations layer is also available, as is the branded queries filter, which reached general availability on 11 March 2026 and separates branded from non-branded queries automatically on eligible properties.² Both are covered in the How to Use Google Search Console guide.

Search Generative AI Performance

A separate report showing how your content performs specifically in Google’s generative AI search features: AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative AI features in Discover. It provides impressions by page, country, device, and date (hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity) as a view alongside the standard Performance report rather than replacing it.³

Click data and query-level metrics are not included. The report launched with a subset of UK website owners in June 2026 and reached all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026.³ For query-level and multi-platform coverage, the standard Performance report and third-party AI visibility tools remain the options.

Pages (Page Indexing report)

Found under Indexing > Pages, this report shows which URLs Google has indexed and which it hasn’t. They are grouped by reason. It is the starting point for any indexing investigation.

Non-indexed reasons include: noindex tag, blocked by robots.txt, soft 404, crawled but not indexed (content quality signal), redirect errors, and duplicate/canonical issues. The troubleshooting guide covers each reason in detail.

URL Inspection

Lets you check any individual URL. You can see whether it’s indexed, when it was last crawled, what the rendered HTML looks like, and what canonical Google has chosen. You can also request indexing directly from this tool to queue a URL for crawling.

Use it when a specific page isn’t appearing in results, after publishing a new important page, or after fixing a technical issue to confirm the fix has been picked up.

Sitemaps

Under Indexing > Sitemaps, you can submit XML sitemaps and see whether Google has processed them successfully. Errors here, such as malformed sitemaps or sitemaps returning 404, prevent Google from efficiently discovering your full URL inventory.

Core Web Vitals

Under Experience > Core Web Vitals, this report shows real-user performance data (from Chrome users) split into Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor thresholds. Issues are grouped by URL pattern. This helps you identify whether a problem affects one template or the whole site.

Links

Under Links, you can see which external domains link to your site, your most-linked pages, and the anchor text used. This data is from Google’s own link index. It won’t match third-party tools exactly, but it’s directionally reliable for spotting your strongest pages and identifying where you have no external signals.

Manual Actions

If Google has applied a manual penalty to your site for a policy violation (unnatural links, cloaking, spam), it appears here. Clean sites should show “No issues detected.” If there is an active manual action, it will significantly suppress rankings until it is resolved and a reconsideration request is submitted.

Platform properties

Alongside the domain and URL-prefix property types, Search Console supports platform properties, which report how content you post on Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube performs on Google.⁴ Announced on 7 July 2026 and available to everyone worldwide from 29 July 2026, they cover Google Search, Discover and Google News, with the Discover and News views appearing only once your content picks up traffic from those surfaces.⁵⁶

Each account or channel is added as its own property, from the same Add property dropdown used for a site, and verified by authorising the platform login. Once connected it reports clicks, impressions, CTR, average position and the search terms that surfaced your posts, through the same Performance, Insights and Achievements views as a site property. Data takes a few days to appear. Ownership is rechecked periodically, and an expired platform login pauses reporting until you re-verify.⁶

Two boundaries are worth being clear about. Platform properties report Google Search performance only: they show nothing about how a post performed inside TikTok or Instagram itself, so they sit alongside native platform analytics rather than replacing them.⁶ And no website is required, which is the point of the feature. Reporting is tied to the connected account, so a creator who has never verified a domain can use Search Console. If you have already claimed a Google Search profile, the accounts verified there are added as platform properties automatically.⁵

Google published an accompanying guide to analysing the data, covering query groups in Insights, the 24-hour filter for spotting a post trending in Search, page filters to compare formats (/watch against /shorts/ on YouTube, /p/ against /reels/ on Instagram), and exporting several properties into one spreadsheet for a cross-platform comparison.⁷

When Search Console’s data was wrong

Two faults have distorted impression data, and both still affect what you see when you look back.

The logging error, 13 May 2025 to 27 April 2026. A logging fault caused Search Console to over-report impressions for roughly 50 weeks. Google fixed it going forward but confirmed the inflated window will not be backfilled.⁸ Clicks were not affected. The consequence is that any year-on-year impression comparison spanning that period measures corrected data against inflated data, and the correction reads as a decline that never happened.

The num=100 removal, September 2025. When Google stopped supporting the results-per-page URL parameter, the automated tools that had been pulling 100 results at a time stopped, on the practitioners’ reading, generating impressions along the way; Google confirmed only that the parameter is unsupported. Reported impressions fell and average position appeared to improve, with nothing having changed on the sites themselves: across 319 properties analysed by Tyler Gargula of LOCOMOTIVE Agency, 87.7% lost impressions and 77.6% lost query count.⁹

Both events move impressions and average position while leaving clicks untouched. That asymmetry is the diagnostic: if impressions and position shifted sharply around September 2025 or April 2026 while clicks held steady, suspect the measurement before you suspect your rankings.

What does Search Console not show?

• Anonymised queries. Rare or sensitive search terms are withheld for privacy and never appear in the query table or the API, even though they count toward your totals (details).
• Ranking data beyond 1,000 queries. The Performance report caps at 1,000 rows by default (you can export more via the API).
• A complete list of affected URLs in Page Indexing. The example list for each status “is limited to 1,000 items, and isn’t guaranteed to show all URLs in a given status, even when less than 1,000 items”.¹⁰ The counts are the number that matters; the URL list beneath them is a sample. Use URL Inspection to settle whether a specific page is affected.
• Historical data beyond 16 months. Data older than 16 months is not accessible in the interface.
• Competitor data. GSC is your data only.
• Conversion or revenue data. Link GA4 for that layer.
• A clean historical impression series. Two known faults distorted impressions between May 2025 and April 2026, and Google has not backfilled the corrections (details).

For full setup instructions, report walkthroughs, diagnostic workflows, and a weekly check routine, see the How to Use Google Search Console guide.

Footnotes

1. Announcing web multimodal Search performance reporting in Search Console — Google Search Central ↩

2. Introducing the branded queries filter in Search Console — Google Search Central Blog ↩

3. Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console — Google Search Central Blog. Carries Google’s note: “As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide.” ↩ ↩²

4. Search Console adds social and video platform properties — Google Search Central Blog ↩

5. Platform properties are now available to everyone, plus a new guide — Google Search Central Blog ↩ ↩²

6. About platform properties in Search Console — Search Console Help ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Analyze your social and video platform content performance in Search Console — Google Search Central ↩

8. Google fixes Search Console’s year-long data logging issue, well, kind of — Search Engine Land Barry Schwartz, 4 May 2026, with Google’s own dates on its Search Console data anomalies page. The “not backfilled” confirmation is John Mueller’s one-word reply to Schwartz on Bluesky, 3 May 2026, which the article links. ↩

9. Why Google Search Console impressions fell (and why that’s good) — Search Engine Land, a contributed column by Karen Bellin, 23 October 2025. The crawler-impression explanation is practitioner inference: Google said only that the parameter is “not something that we formally support” (Search Engine Land, 18 September 2025). ↩

10. Page Indexing report — Search Console Help ↩