What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free service from Google that shows how Google Search sees your website. It tells you which searches your pages appear for and how often people click, which pages are in Google's index and why others are not, and whether Google has found problems such as a manual action or hacked content. You need a Google account and proof that you control the site. Your site can appear in Google without it.

What can you do in Search Console?

Each report answers a different question about your site:

• Performance. Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, broken down by query, page, country, device, search appearance and date. Separate reports cover Discover and Google News where your site appears there.
• URL Inspection. Whether one address is indexed, which canonical Google chose, when it was last crawled, and a live test of the current page. This is also where you request indexing.
• Page indexing. How many of your URLs are indexed, grouped by the reason Google gives for the rest, with a way to ask Google to validate a fix.
• Sitemaps. Submit sitemap files and see whether Google could read them.
• Core Web Vitals. Loading, responsiveness and visual stability measured on real Chrome visits, grouped by similar pages.
• Manual actions and Security issues. Whether a reviewer at Google has penalised the site, or Google has detected hacking or malware.
• Links. Which sites link to yours and which of your pages they point to.
• Removals and settings. Temporarily hide a URL from results, add users, and tell Google about a move to a new domain.

Who is Search Console for?

Google's own overview names four groups: business owners, who should know it exists; SEO specialists and marketers, who track traffic and rankings; site administrators, who watch for server errors and security problems; and web developers, who fix markup such as structured data. In practice anyone responsible for traffic from Google ends up in it.

Do you need Search Console to rank in Google?

No. Google says plainly that you don't have to sign up for Search Console to be included in its results, and its guide to how Search works adds that Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher. Search Console changes nothing on its own. It is a window into what Google already does with your site, plus a few levers: sitemaps, recrawl requests, removals and validation of fixes.

What Search Console does not tell you

• What happens after the click. Sessions, engagement and conversions belong to Google Analytics; see Google Search Console vs Google Analytics.
• Every query. Searches made by very few people are hidden for privacy. Google's deep dive on performance data explains that they are left out of the tables but still counted in the chart totals.
• Old history. Performance data covers the last 16 months.
• Other people's sites. You only see properties you own or were added to, so competitor research needs other tools.

How do you start?

Sign in with a Google account, add your site as a property, prove ownership, then submit a sitemap. How do I set up Google Search Console? covers the whole sequence, and Is Google Search Console free? covers the cost question, including the API and the BigQuery export.

How AutoPSEO helps

AutoPSEO is built on your Search Console data. Connect a Google account and every property it can read is imported (Connecting Search Console); for stored properties AutoPSEO keeps a daily copy, so your history outlives the 16-month window. Its content engine reads the searches you already appear for, finds the ones no page of yours answers, writes those articles in your site's format, and refreshes the articles it manages when their clicks fall away. For a longer introduction, read What Google Search Console is.