# Google Search Console *Google's reporting tool for site owners* Search Console is the free tool where Google reports what it knows about your site: which queries showed it, where it ranked, which pages are indexed and which are not, and what its crawler found wrong. It is the only first-party source for any of it. **Canonical:** https://spoko.space/glossary/google-search-console/ **Language:** en **Category:** SEO and AI search **Also known as:** GSC, Search Console, Webmaster Tools **Published:** 2026-09-22 **Glossary:** https://spoko.space/glossary/ --- ## What it is {#what-it-is} Google's own report on your site, from the inside of Search. Four things matter in it: **Performance** — every query that showed your site, how often, at what average position, and how often it was clicked. Nothing else gives you real queries; the keyword tools sell estimates. **Pages** — which URLs are indexed, and for those that are not, Google's reason in its own words. **Experience** — the field Core Web Vitals, grouped by URL. **Manual actions and security issues** — the two reports nobody looks at until the day they matter. ## Why it matters if you are paying for a website {#why-it-matters-if-you-are-paying-for-a-website} Because it is the only place the search engine answers directly, and because it is free and takes ten minutes to verify. An agency's report is a rendering of this data; the original is yours. ## What I use it for {#what-i-use-it-for} Two things, mostly. **Diagnosis.** The clearest case I have written up is a WordPress site injected with Japanese spam: the tell was not on the site at all, it was in Search Console — thousands of indexed URLs nobody had created, sitting in a report the owner had never opened. The infection was invisible from the front page and obvious from that list. **Watching.** I built a dashboard that reads the Search Console API on a schedule, because the interface keeps sixteen months and shows you one property at a time, and because the useful question is usually a comparison — this month against last, this page against the one that replaced it. Two things worth knowing before you read the reports. The data lags by two or three days, so today's change is not in there yet. And **"Discovered – currently not indexed"** is not an error: it means Google saw the URL and chose not to spend a crawl on it, which is a judgement about value, not a bug to fix with a plugin. ## What Search Console is not {#what-search-console-is-not} It is not analytics. Analytics tells you what people did on the site; Search Console tells you what happened in the search results *before* the visit, for the fraction of traffic that came from Google. Both are worth having and neither answers the other's questions. ## Related terms {#related-terms} - [Core Web Vitals](https://spoko.space/glossary/core-web-vitals/): Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google collects from real Chrome visits: LCP for loading, INP for responsiveness and CLS for visual stability. A URL passes when 75% of its visits are inside the good threshold. — Markdown: https://spoko.space/glossary/core-web-vitals.md - [AEO](https://spoko.space/glossary/aeo/): AEO is the work of making a page usable as a source by systems that answer questions directly — AI assistants and AI overviews — rather than only listing links. The goal shifts from being clicked to being quoted correctly and attributed. — Markdown: https://spoko.space/glossary/aeo.md - [canonical URL](https://spoko.space/glossary/canonical-url/): A canonical URL is the address a page names as the real one for its content, so a search engine that reaches it by any other route indexes the named version instead. It is a strong hint, not an instruction, and Google can overrule it. — Markdown: https://spoko.space/glossary/canonical-url.md - [hreflang](https://spoko.space/glossary/hreflang/): An hreflang annotation tells a search engine that two pages are the same document in different languages. It only works when both sides name each other and each one names itself — a one-sided set is discarded for the whole cluster. — Markdown: https://spoko.space/glossary/hreflang.md ## Where I write about this {#related-posts} - [SEO Monitoring Dashboard](https://spoko.space/seo-monitoring-dashboard/) — Markdown: https://spoko.space/seo-monitoring-dashboard.md A private dashboard that watches backlinks, Google positions, index status and Core Web Vitals across my own sites — built entirely on free Google APIs, with alerts when something moves. - [Japanese SEO Spam on WordPress — How to Spot and Remove It](https://spoko.space/blog/japanese-seo-spam-wordpress/) — Markdown: https://spoko.space/blog/japanese-seo-spam-wordpress.md Your site looks normal, while Google shows hundreds of Japanese shop pages that never existed. How to spot the keyword hack and clean it out for good. ## See also {#see-also} - [AI visibility audit](https://spoko.space/ai-search-audit/) ## Sources {#sources} - [Search Console — overview](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9128668) — What each report contains and who it is for. - [Get started with Search Console](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/monitor-debug/search-console-start) — Verification, property types, and what the data can and cannot answer.