What is Google Search Console, and how do you use it?

What Search Console is

Search Console is Google's view of your site, shared with you. It is the only place that shows real Google Search data for your pages: impressions, clicks, positions and the queries behind them, plus Google's own record of which URLs it indexed and why it skipped others.

How to set it up

• Sign in at search.google.com/search-console with a Google account.
• Add a Domain property and verify it with the DNS TXT record Google gives you. A domain property covers every subdomain and both http and https.
• Submit your XML sitemap under Sitemaps.
• Give access to anyone else who needs it under Settings, Users and permissions, rather than sharing your account. Data starts appearing within days. Historical data from before verification is not available.

The reports that matter

• Performance. Clicks, impressions, average click-through rate and average position, by query, page, country and device. Start here every time.
• Page indexing. How many pages are indexed and the reasons others are not, such as crawled but not indexed, duplicate without user-selected canonical, or blocked by robots.txt.
• URL Inspection. One URL in detail: whether it is indexed, the canonical Google chose, when it was last crawled, and a live test.
• Sitemaps. Whether Google read your sitemap and how many URLs it found.
• Core Web Vitals. Field data on loading, interactivity and layout stability from real Chrome users, when there is enough traffic.
• Manual actions and Security issues. Rare, but the first place to look if traffic collapses.

How to read it without fooling yourself

• Average position is an average across many queries and impressions. A drop can mean you started appearing for more queries, not that you got worse.
• Not indexed is normal for some pages. Redirects, duplicates and noindexed pages are supposed to be excluded.
• Data is delayed by a few days and some reports update less often than others.
• Request indexing helps an individual important URL. It does not speed up a whole site.

What it cannot tell you

Search Console shows only Google Search. It does not show your rank for queries you never appear for, competitors' data, traffic from other search engines, or what happens after the click. Use analytics for behavior and Bing Webmaster Tools for Bing, which also feeds several AI assistants.

What a scan can and cannot tell you

Search Console tells you what Google decided. A WebAuditOS scan shows the technical reasons behind many of those decisions on your side: pages marked noindex, missing sitemaps, missing canonical declarations and pages returning errors.

A scan cannot see Google's index, your rankings or your search traffic. Use both: the scan to find causes you control, Search Console to see the result.

If Search Console says a page is not indexed and a scan finds nothing technically wrong, the reason is usually content quality or duplication, not a broken tag.

Short answers

Is Search Console free? Yes.

Domain or URL-prefix property? Domain, if you can add a DNS record. It covers everything.

How long until data shows? Usually a few days after verification.

Does Search Console affect rankings? No. It reports on them.