Definition:
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free Google service that allows website owners to monitor, maintain and resolve issues related to their site’s presence in Google search results. It is intended for site owners, administrators, developers and SEO professionals.
It provides information about search performance, crawling, indexing, links and certain technical issues. A site does not need to be registered in Search Console for Google to include it in its results.
Table of contents
What Google Search Console is used for
Google Search Console helps explain how Google finds a site’s pages and how they appear on search engine results pages, or SERPs. Its data allows issues to be detected, visibility changes to be investigated and SEO work to be guided.
For example, it allows users to check which queries generate impressions and clicks, investigate why a page is not indexed or detect difficulties with Googlebot access. The information helps diagnose problems, but many corrections must be made on the website itself or its server.
Using the tool, submitting a sitemap or requesting indexing does not guarantee that a page will be included in Google or improve its position.
Origin of Google Search Console
The service was known as Google Webmaster Tools before adopting the name Google Search Console in 2015. The change reflected the fact that its users were not only webmasters, but also marketers, business owners, developers and search specialists.
The platform has evolved with new reports and tools for analysing site visibility and technical issues. It has also retired features, so usage instructions should match the options available in the current interface.
Google Search Console features
The main tools and reports cover the following areas:
- Property verification and access: allows control over a domain or URL-prefix property to be verified. A verified owner can also grant other users access with different permissions.
- Performance reports: show clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR) and average position. They allow analysis by queries, pages, countries and devices, among other breakdowns.
- Generative AI performance reports: show impressions of site links in features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. They allow analysis by pages, countries, devices and dates. There is also a dedicated report for generative AI features in Discover. These reports show visibility through impressions, not a dedicated breakdown of clicks, CTR or position. The data remains included in the overall reports and should not be added as extra traffic.
- Sitemap submission: allows the location of sitemaps to be communicated and their processing status to be checked. A sitemap helps Google discover URLs but does not oblige it to index them.
- Page indexing: shows indexed pages and reasons why others have not been added to the index. Not every reason for exclusion is an error: some pages may be intentionally excluded.
- URL inspection: allows users to check a page’s indexing information, its last crawl and the canonical URL selected by Google. It also offers a live URL test and, where applicable, an indexing request.
- Crawl statistics: provides information about Googlebot requests, server responses and potential availability problems. It does not allow a crawl frequency to be set manually.
- robots.txt report: allows users to view files Google has fetched and potential problems retrieving them. The file is edited on the website or server, not within Search Console.
- Links report: shows information about internal and external links detected by Google. It should not be treated as an exhaustive inventory of all links to or within the site.
- Core Web Vitals: reports on loading, interactivity and visual stability using real-user data, when sufficient information is available. It does not replace a complete user experience audit.
- Security issues and manual actions: these are separate reports. The first can flag malware, hacked content or other threats; the second reports actions applied following a human review for violations of spam policies.
- Search Console API: allows performance and URL inspection data to be queried and properties and sitemaps to be managed programmatically. It is not used to create, modify or delete ads.
Google also provides the Disavow links tool, which is intended for exceptional use. It is designed for situations involving artificial links that have caused or may cause a manual action, not for automatically rejecting every link that a tool considers low quality.