Google Search Console

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

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

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

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.