What can I do with Google Search Console?
By GEO Search Console Published
You can do six main jobs with Google Search Console: see the searches that bring people to your site, fix pages Google hasn't indexed, inspect a single address, submit sitemaps, read your links, and catch problems before they cost you traffic.
All six are free, and each one has its own report. This page is part of our Google Search Console FAQ.
See what you rank for with Google Search Console
The first thing to do with Google Search Console is open the Performance report and sort the queries by impressions.
That list is every search where Google showed your site, with clicks and average position for each.
The quickest wins sit at positions 8 to 20: searches where you are close to page one already. Improve the page that ranks for them, then check where it ranks today with our keyword rank checker, which reads Google's top 30 for every variation of a phrase.
Fix indexing problems in Google Search Console
To fix indexing problems, Google Search Console tells you which pages are not indexed and why.
The Page indexing report groups them by reason, such as a noindex tag, a redirect, or "Crawled, currently not indexed".
The URL Inspection tool checks one address at a time: whether it is indexed, which canonical Google chose, and when Googlebot last crawled it. After a fix, the same tool lets you ask Google to crawl the page again.
Submit sitemaps, read links and catch problems
You can also submit sitemaps, read your links and catch problems early in Google Search Console:
- Submit a sitemap in the Sitemaps report so Google finds new pages faster.
- Read the Links report for your most linked pages, the sites that link to you and their anchor text.
- Get warned about manual actions, security issues and broken structured data, by email as well as in the reports.
Search Console now reports AI search too: its Generative AI features report counts how often Google showed your pages in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Our AI performance report reads that export next to Bing's.
Free tools for this guide
2 Search On our server
Rank Report
Where you rank for every variation
Open the keyword rank checker
5 Measure In your browser
AI Performance
Google's and Bing's AI reports together
Open the AI performance report
References
- Page indexing report, Search Console Help. support.google.com/
webmasters/ answer/ 7440203 - URL Inspection tool, Search Console Help. support.google.com/
webmasters/ answer/ 9012289 - Sitemaps report, Search Console Help. support.google.com/
webmasters/ answer/ 7451001 - Reports at a glance, Search Console Help.