How to Use Google Search Console: Setup, the Reports Worth Reading and a Monthly Routine

Domain property or URL prefix: pick the one that sees everything

The first screen asks a question that decides what you will see for years. A Domain property covers every subdomain and protocol: www and non-www, http and https, the shop and the blog. A URL-prefix property covers only addresses that start with the exact prefix you type, so https://example.com/ misses http://example.com/ and m.example.com. Choose Domain unless you cannot edit DNS. You can add both, up to 1,000 properties per account.

1. 1

   Sign in with an account the business owns

   Use a company Google account, not a contractor's or a personal one that leaves with an employee. You can add people later.

2. 2

   Add a Domain property

   Type the bare domain, such as example.com, with no https and no www.

3. 3

   Add the TXT record

   Copy the record Search Console shows into your DNS settings, then click Verify. DNS changes can take a while to spread, so retry later if it fails the first time.

4. 4

   Leave the record in place

   Google says verification lasts as long as it can confirm your token. Remove it and, after a grace period, your access expires.

5. 5

   Submit your sitemap

   In the Sitemaps report, paste the sitemap address into Add a new sitemap and click Submit. Your platform or SEO plugin usually generates one, and its address is often listed in your robots.txt file.

6. 6

   Link it to GA4

   Connecting Search Console to Google Analytics puts query data next to your conversions. Google says the data reaches both tools 48 hours after Search Console collects it.

Set it up today even if you plan to ignore it, because the history is what makes the reports useful later. If you also want Bing's view, Bing Webmaster Tools can import verified sites straight from Search Console.

The Performance report: four numbers and the story behind them

Performance is where you will spend most of your time. It counts four things, in Google's definitions: clicks, the times a user clicked through to your site from Google Search; impressions, how many times your site appeared in results; CTR, clicks divided by impressions; and average position, the average position of the topmost result from your site. It opens on the last three months and Search Console keeps 16 months of history.

Below the chart, tabs regroup the same data by Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search appearance and Dates. The search type filter now splits Web into text-based searches and multimodal ones started from an image, such as Google Lens or Circle to Search, alongside Image, Video and News. Some queries are hidden to protect searchers' privacy, so the query table never adds up to the chart total. That is normal, not a bug.

• Branded queries filter. Introduced in November 2025, it splits searches that include your brand from everything else. Google says it may misclassify some queries, and it is not offered to sites with a low number of impressions.
• Annotations. Right-click the chart to note a launch, a redesign or a price change, up to 120 characters. A property holds 200 notes, and Google deletes notes older than 500 days.
• Compare mode. Year over year separates a seasonal dip from a real loss.
• The 24-hour view. Hourly data for the last day, useful on launch days and little else.

Non-branded clicks are the number that shows whether SEO is working, because branded searchers were looking for you anyway. Our guides to click-through rate and SEO KPIs explain what to do with what you find here.

The Generative AI performance report counts impressions, not clicks

Since August 31, 2026, every site has a Generative AI performance report (Search). It shows impressions only: how many times links to your site were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. It does not show clicks. It leaves out Search Labs experiments, carries the same 1,000-row limit as the standard report, and may not appear at all for a site with very few AI impressions. Google Discover gets a report of its own.

The clicks are not missing. Google counts clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the ordinary Performance report under the Web search type. An AI Overview occupies a single position, and every link inside it is assigned that position. In AI Mode, a follow-up question counts as a new query.

For visits from ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, look in GA4 instead: its AI Assistant channel collects them, while AI Overviews and AI Mode stay in Organic Search. Our guide to tracking AI traffic in GA4 covers that side, and AI Overviews took my clicks covers what to do about the shrinking click.

Page indexing and URL Inspection: what Google kept and why it dropped the rest

The Page indexing report sorts every URL Google knows into Indexed and Not indexed, with a reason for each. Google's own advice: "Don't expect every URL on your site to be indexed." Tag pages, filters, duplicates and redirects are supposed to be left out. What matters is whether the pages that sell are in. Use the dropdown above the chart to show only your submitted pages, which turns the report into a scorecard for your sitemap.

After a fix, click Validate fix. Google says validation typically takes up to about two weeks and sometimes much longer, and it stops if a single instance of the problem remains.

URL Inspection is the magnifying glass for a single address. It shows whether the URL "is on Google," the last crawl, whether Google crawled it as a phone or a desktop, and two canonicals side by side: the one you declared and the one Google selected. That default view is the indexed version. Test live URL fetches the page now, and View tested page shows the rendered HTML and a screenshot. Request indexing asks for a recrawl; it has a daily limit and, as Google puts it, "does not guarantee that the page will appear."

The other reports, each in a paragraph

• Sitemaps. Each sitemap should read Success. Has errors means some URLs parsed and some did not. Couldn't fetch means Google could not retrieve the file at all, often a robots.txt block or a wrong address. The XML sitemaps guide covers the file itself.
• Core Web Vitals. Real-visitor data from the Chrome UX Report, grouped by similar pages, scored separately for mobile and desktop over 28 days. A URL takes the status of its worst metric. Low-traffic sites may see no data at all.
• HTTPS. Counts indexed URLs served over HTTP against HTTPS and lists a sample of reasons, such as an invalid certificate, a sitemap pointing to HTTP addresses or HTTPS pages that redirect to HTTP. For a padlock warning in the browser, see mixed content errors.
• Links. Top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text from outside, plus your most linked pages from inside. Google calls it a sample, not a complete list, and it does not say which links are nofollow.
• Manual actions. A human reviewer at Google found pages breaking its spam policies. Fix every affected page, then click Request Review. Google says most reviews take several days or weeks.
• Security issues and Removals. Security issues flags hacked content and malware. Removals hides a URL from results for about six months, and it is not a permanent delete.

For the links behind the Links report, start with the link building section. For a manual action, read white hat SEO before writing the review request, and if pages vanished overnight, Google deindexed my website walks the recovery.

Five checks for the first Monday of every month

Search Console rewards a routine more than a heroic quarterly deep dive. This takes twenty minutes once the property has a few months of data.

1. 1

   Compare non-branded clicks year over year

   In Performance, filter out branded queries and compare the last 28 days with the same period last year. A slide here is the earliest honest warning you get.

2. 2

   Find the pages that lost the most

   Group by Pages, compare with the previous period and sort by the clicks difference. Open the top three losers and look for a cause: a title change, a new competitor, an AI Overview.

3. 3

   Read the indexing count against your sitemap

   Indexed submitted pages should hold steady or grow. A sudden fall usually traces to a release, a plugin or a server problem.

4. 4

   Check the warning lights

   Manual actions, Security issues and new emails from Search Console. These should be empty; if not, they outrank everything else on this list.

5. 5

   Note what changed

   Add an annotation for anything you shipped this month. Next year you will know why the line moved.

When a check turns red, our traffic drop diagnosis works through the causes in order, and the technical SEO guide covers most of the fixes.

Who gets the keys, and taking them back from an old agency

Search Console has three levels of access. An owner has full control and can add or remove people. A full user sees all data and can take some actions, but cannot add users. A restricted user has simple view rights on most data. A property can have up to 100 non-owner users. Give your agency full user access unless it truly needs to manage settings.

Owners come in two kinds. A delegated owner was added by another owner, and removing them takes one click. A verified owner proved ownership with their own token, and Google warns that removing their access is not enough while that token stays on the site, because they can verify again. Delete their HTML file, meta tag or DNS record too, then check the unused tokens and ownership history lists. Before you delete a token, make sure it is not also verifying Merchant Center or Google Workspace.

The business should own its Search Console property. The agency should be a guest in it.

If you are choosing someone new, our guide to hiring an SEO lists the questions about account ownership to ask before you sign.

What Search Console will not tell you

It is Google's view of Google, and only that. It shows no competitor data and no Bing, ChatGPT or Perplexity results. It does not show leads or sales, which live in GA4 and your phone system, so set up conversion tracking if the two are not connected. Average position is an average across every search that showed you, not a rank for one keyword; a rank tracker answers that question. And the tables keep only the most important rows, so large sites see a slice.

Nor will it fix anything. The reports point at problems; someone still has to change the site, the content and the links. That is the work in our SEO programs, with monthly reports built on these same numbers, and the starting point is our free website audit. The SEO guide shows how the rest of the work fits together.