Google Search Console is a free service from Google that shows site owners how their website performs in Google Search. It reports queries, clicks, impressions, and average position, flags indexing and security problems, and lets you submit sitemaps and inspect individual URLs.
At a glance
- Type
- free Google service for site owners
- Former name
- Google Webmaster Tools (until May 2015)
- Performance report
- default view covers the past three months
- Export limits
- 1,000 rows in the interface, up to 50,000 rows per day, site, and search type via the API
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What does Search Console show?
The main reports:
- Performance: clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position for the past three months by default. Data can be broken down by query, page, country, device, search appearance, and date, and filtered by search type (web, image, video, news).
- Page indexing: which URLs Google has indexed and why others are not indexed, with statuses such as “Crawled - currently not indexed”.
- URL Inspection: crawl, index, and serving details for one URL straight from the Google index, plus a button to request indexing.
- Sitemaps: submit XML sitemaps and see whether Google could process them.
- Core Web Vitals: loading and interaction metrics from real Chrome users, split into mobile and desktop.
- Manual actions and security issues: notices when Google takes action against spam or detects malware or hacked content.
- Links: external and internal links Google knows about.
How do you set up Search Console?
You need a Google account. Then you add a property and verify ownership. A domain property covers all protocols and subdomains (http, https, www, and others) and can only be verified through a DNS record. A URL-prefix property covers a single prefix such as https://www.example.com/ and supports other methods, including an HTML file upload, a meta tag, Google Analytics, or Google Tag Manager.
Signing up is optional. Google’s help page states that a site does not need Search Console to appear in Google Search. Search Console makes visible how Google sees the site.
The service was called Google Webmaster Tools until May 2015.
Example
After a site relaunch, clicks in the Performance report drop by 30 percent. Filtering by page shows that most of the loss comes from old blog URLs. At the same time, the Page indexing report shows a rising number of URLs with the reason “Not found (404)”. The cause is missing redirects for the blog section.
Common mistakes
- Adding up table rows. Anonymized queries are left out of the table but included in the chart totals unless you filter by query. The sum of the rows is therefore usually lower than the total.
- Relying on a single URL-prefix property. A property for
https://www.example.com/covers only that prefix. Data forhttp://, other subdomains, or other protocols requires a domain property, verified through DNS. - Removing the verification token. Search Console checks periodically whether the DNS record, file, or meta tag is still in place. If verification can no longer be confirmed, permissions expire after a grace period.
- Assuming an export is complete. The interface exports at most 1,000 rows. The API returns up to 50,000 rows per day, per site, and per search type.
FAQ
Is Google Search Console free? Yes. Google offers it at no cost.
What is the difference between Search Console and Google Analytics? Search Console covers what happens in Google Search before a visit: impressions, clicks, positions, and technical problems Google found. Google Analytics measures what visitors do on the site, regardless of where they came from.
Does Search Console show every query? No. Google omits so-called anonymized queries from tables to protect user privacy. A 2022 Search Central blog post defines them as queries not issued by more than a few dozen users over a two-to-three-month period. They are still counted in the chart totals unless you filter by query, so the rows in the table rarely add up to the total.
How often should I check Search Console? Google does not expect a daily check. Search Console sends email alerts for new issues, and Google suggests looking at the reports regularly, especially after changes to the site.
| Aspect | Google Search Console | Google Analytics 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility in Search | Impression: a link to the site was seen (or potentially seen) in Search, Discover or News | no own data; once linked, GA4 shows Search Console metrics in dedicated reports |
| Visit from Search | Click: for most result types, any click that sends the user to a page outside Google Search, Discover or News | records the visit on the site (session, events); clicks from Google Search only through the Search Console link |
| Session | no such metric | Session: starts with a page or screen view when no session is active and times out after 30 minutes of inactivity by default |
| Page views | no such metric | Views: number of web pages or app screens users saw, repeated views included |
| Data source | Google's data on how the site appears in Google Search | events sent by the Google tag (JavaScript) on the site; visits without JavaScript enabled are missing |
| Delay | data usually available in 2–3 days; the newest data can be preliminary | processing can take 24–48 hours; Search Console data appears in GA4 48 hours after collection |
| Privacy | anonymized queries: very rare queries are omitted from the table but included in chart totals | data thresholds: rows with demographic data or search query information may be withheld when there are too few users; not adjustable |
| Completeness | data truncation: only the most important rows are stored and shown, the table shows up to 1,000 rows; the most complete list comes from the bulk data export | sampling: if a query exceeds the event quota (10 million events for standard properties), a subset is used and scaled up |
Search Console clicks and GA4 sessions count different things, so their numbers differ. Google lists privacy, processing, time lag, time zones (Search Console counts days in Pacific Time) and JavaScript among the reasons. The two help pages give different delays (2–3 days in the Search Console Help, 48 hours in the GA4 Help on the integration). Sources: Search-Console-Hilfe: Impressionen, Position und Klicks; Search-Console-Hilfe: Leistungsbericht – Fehlerbehebung und Datenabweichungen; Search-Console-Hilfe: Leistungsbericht – Dimensionen und Datengruppierungen; Search-Console-Hilfe: So werden Klicks und Impressionen gezählt (vorläufige Daten); Analytics-Hilfe: [GA4] Analytics-Sitzungen; Analytics-Hilfe: [GA4] Dimensionen und Messwerte; Analytics-Hilfe: Datenaktualität; Analytics-Hilfe: [GA4] Datengrenzwerte; Analytics-Hilfe: [GA4] Stichprobenerhebung; Analytics-Hilfe: [GA4] Search Console-Integration; Analytics-Hilfe: [GA4] Datenerfassung für Websites einrichten. Last checked: .
Sources
- About Search Console – Search Console Helpsupport.google.com
- How to use Search Console – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Performance report (Search results) – Search Console Helpsupport.google.com
- What are impressions, position, and clicks? – Search Console Helpsupport.google.com
- Page indexing report – Search Console Helpsupport.google.com
- Verify your site ownership – Search Console Helpsupport.google.com
- A deep dive into Search Console performance data filtering and limits – Google Search Central Blog (Oct 2022)developers.google.com
- Announcing Google Search Console – the new Webmaster Tools – Google Search Central Blog (May 2015)developers.google.com
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