Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows how a website performs in Google Search. It reports which search queries showed the site's pages, how often people clicked them, and whether Google was able to crawl and index each page. The data comes from Google's own systems, so it describes what happened inside Google Search before a visitor ever reached the site.
An analytics tool such as Google Analytics measures what visitors do after they arrive. Search Console measures the step before that: the search results page itself. Because the two tools answer different questions, they are often used side by side.
How does a website get into Search Console?
A site owner adds the site as a property and proves ownership. Google will not show search data for a site until ownership is verified, because the reports reveal information that competitors should not see.
There are two kinds of property:
- Domain property. Covers every subdomain and both http and https versions of a domain. It is verified by adding a TXT record to the domain's DNS settings.
- URL-prefix property. Covers only URLs that start with an exact address, such as https://www.example.com/. It can be verified by uploading an HTML file, adding a meta tag to the home page, or through an existing Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager setup.
Once verified, data starts to appear after a short delay. Search Console keeps performance data for a rolling window of 16 months, so long-term comparisons need to be exported and stored elsewhere.
What does the Performance report show?
Most people use the Performance report more than any other part. It counts four metrics for searches in which the site appeared.
| Metric | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Impressions | How many times a link to the site was shown in results |
| Clicks | How many times someone clicked that link |
| CTR (click-through rate) | Clicks divided by impressions |
| Average position | The average rank of the site's highest result for each search |
Each metric can be broken down by query, page, country, device and search appearance (special result types such as rich results). Filters can also separate web search from image, video and news results. Comparing two date ranges shows which queries or pages gained or lost traffic.
Some queries never appear in the table. Google hides rare queries to protect searchers' privacy, so the sum of clicks per query is usually lower than the total clicks for the site. This is expected and does not mean anything is broken.
How does Search Console report crawling and indexing?
A page has to be fetched by Googlebot (Google's crawler) and stored in Google's index before it can show up in results. Several reports cover that process.
- Page indexing. Lists which URLs are indexed and groups the rest by reason, for example "Blocked by robots.txt", "Crawled, currently not indexed" or "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". A sudden rise in one reason often points to a site change that went wrong, such as a faulty robots.txt rule.
- URL Inspection. Shows the status of a single URL: whether it is indexed, when Google last crawled it, which version Google considers the main one (the canonical), and how the rendered page looks to Googlebot. An owner can request indexing of an updated page from here.
- Sitemaps. Lets the owner submit an XML sitemap, a file listing the URLs they want crawled, and shows how many of those URLs were discovered.
Other reports cover Core Web Vitals (loading speed and layout stability measured on real visits), links pointing to the site, manual actions taken by Google's reviewers, and security problems such as hacked pages.
What can Search Console show about AI search?
Google now writes generated answers on its own results pages. A Google AI Overview appears above the regular links, and AI Mode is a separate conversational view. When a site is linked from these features, Google counts the impression and any click in the standard Performance report, inside the web search totals.
No filter separates AI Overview or AI Mode traffic from ordinary results. A query may show rising impressions and a falling click-through rate, which fits an answer being shown above the links, but the report does not confirm the cause. Average position is also harder to read, because a link inside an AI feature is assigned a position on the page like any other result.
Search Console covers Google only. Visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Claude never pass through Google Search, so they do not appear here. Those visits show up as AI referral traffic in web analytics, and the steps for isolating them are described in how to see AI traffic in Google Analytics 4.
What does this mean for measuring a website?
For any site that depends on Google, Search Console answers two practical questions: can Google find and index the pages, and which queries bring people to them. Indexing problems found here also affect AI features built on Google's index, because a page that is not indexed cannot be retrieved for an AI Overview.
Search Console cannot show whether a brand is mentioned in an AI answer without a click, or how often an assistant outside Google recommends it. Measuring that means running the same questions on each AI platform repeatedly and recording the results, which is how AI visibility is measured. In practice, sites combine Search Console for Google results, analytics for visits from every source, and repeated prompt checks for answers that produce no visit at all.
