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What is Search Console data?

By GEO Search Console Published

Search Console data is what Google recorded about your site in its own systems: the searches your pages showed up for, the clicks and impressions they got, their average position, and whether each page is indexed.

That makes it different from every other SEO number you will see. Paid tools estimate traffic and rankings from the outside. Search Console reports what Google logged, so it is the closest thing to ground truth for Google Search. This page is part of our Google Search Console FAQ.

The four performance numbers in Search Console data

Search Console data starts with four numbers in the Performance report, and Google defines each one in its help page on impressions, position and clicks:

  • Clicks: how many times someone clicked through to your site from a Google result.
  • Impressions: how many times a link to your site appeared in results a searcher saw.
  • Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions.
  • Average position: the average spot of your topmost result, where 1 is the first result.

You can split all four by query, page, country, device, search appearance and date. The report opens on the past three months.

The status data Search Console reports

Search Console data also covers the health of your pages, not just their traffic.

The Page indexing report lists which pages are in Google's index and why the others are not. Other reports cover sitemaps, Core Web Vitals, structured data, links, manual actions and security issues.

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.

How long Google keeps Search Console data

Google keeps 16 months of Search Console performance data, and older days drop off for good.

If you want to compare this year with two years ago, or look at the months before a core update, you need your own copy. Our free Search Console data warehouse saves every day on your own hosting.

Some searches never appear at all. Queries searched by only a few dozen people over two to three months are anonymized: they count in the totals but never show as rows. Our page on what data you can get from Search Console covers those limits and the export routes.

References

  1. Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup, Search Console Help. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553
  2. What are impressions, position, and clicks?, Search Console Help. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828
  3. Page indexing report, Search Console Help. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203
  4. A deep dive into Search Console performance data filtering and limits, Google Search Central Blog, 2022.