Google Search Console: every report, setting and limit

This is the first guide in our path "SEO tools explained". It's for anyone who already has a site and a Search Console account, or is about to: shop and clinic owners, marketers, freelancers and junior SEOs. If you've never set it up, do that first with chapter 8 of SEO for beginners. It takes about 20 minutes. Then come back here.

By the end you'll be able to read the Performance report without falling into its traps, and filter it with regex and comparisons. You'll find out why a page isn't on Google and fix it, and check speed, security and penalties. And when the 1,000-row table runs short, you'll get all your data out through the API, Data Studio or BigQuery.

There are eight chapters, about an hour in all. Chapter 1 explains what the tool is and when you don't need parts of it. Chapters 2 to 7 go report by report, each with real jobs done step by step, using examples like a sweet shop in Kanpur and a dentist in Delhi. Chapter 8 covers what's free, what the limits are, and what paid tools add on top (prices checked 16 October 2026). A FAQ and a 10-question quiz close the guide.

Every menu name and limit here comes from Google's own help pages and blog, and every price from the vendor's own pricing page, all linked in the references. Search Console changes its menus often, so where a label may have moved since we checked, the text says "at the time of writing".

Think of Search Console as the one place where Google talks to you about your site. Analytics tools see visitors after they arrive. Rank trackers guess where you stand. Search Console is Google's own record of what it crawled, what it indexed and what it showed people.

What it does

Google describes it as "a free service" that helps you "monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results".^[1] In practice it lets you:

• check that Google can find and crawl your site
• fix indexing problems and ask Google to recrawl new or changed pages
• see your search traffic: how often you appear, for which searches, and how often people click
• get alerts when Google finds indexing, spam or other problems
• see which sites link to yours

You don't need Search Console to be in Google. Google says so plainly: signing up isn't required to be included in results.^[1] It's a window into what Google already does with your site, not a switch that turns search on.

What it doesn't do

Know its edges before you start. People expect things it was never built for.

• No competitor data. You only see sites you've verified.
• No visitor behaviour. What people do after they land (calls, forms, sales) is GA4's job. Our GA4 guide covers that.
• No search volumes. Impressions tell you how often you were shown, not how often a phrase is searched. For volumes use Google Keyword Planner.
• No Bing. Bing has its own free tool, covered in our Bing Webmaster Tools guide.
• No exact rank. Average position is an average across many searches, not your rank for one keyword (chapter 3).

Who it's for

Google lists four groups: business owners, SEO specialists and marketers, site administrators and web developers.^[1] For a small business in India, that usually means two people. The owner should know it exists, own the account and glance at it once a month. Whoever runs the website (an employee, a freelancer or an agency) uses it weekly.

Since July 2026 there's a third kind of user: creators. Search Console now has platform properties for Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube accounts, which show how your posts and videos perform on Google Search, Discover and Google News. They became available to everyone on 29 July 2026.^[2] They only count what happens on Google, not views inside the app itself.^[3]

When you don't need parts of it

Here's the honest bit. You should set Search Console up for every site, but you don't have to read every report. Google's own help pages say so:

So a 20-page site for a Delhi dental clinic really needs three things from Search Console: the Performance report, URL Inspection for its key pages, and an eye on the manual action and security alerts. That takes 15 minutes a month. The rest of this guide is for when something goes wrong or the site grows.

A map of the menu

The left-hand menu groups the reports. At the time of writing it runs roughly like this; labels and order can differ a little in your account:

Google's "Reports at a glance" page lists them all, with who each one is for.^[7] Discover and News reports appear only if your site gets enough traffic there.

The Overview page

Overview is the first screen you see. It summarises search performance, recommendations and indexing, plus rich results and shopping if your site has them.^[8] Its chart mixes Search and Discover clicks if you have Discover data, so don't compare it with the Performance report and wonder why the numbers differ.

Recommendations sit here too. Google shows them only when it has something actionable, in three kinds: issues, opportunities and configuration. They're optional and expire over time.^[9] Read them; ignore any that don't fit your goals.

If you only check in now and then, Google's own suggestion for the Overview page is a good routine: look for manual actions or security issues first, then for spikes in indexing or enhancement errors, then for sharp dips in clicks.^[7]

Property

One website (or part of one, or a social account) that you've added to Search Console. Each has its own data and users.

Impression

One time a link to your site was shown in a Google result. The person didn't have to click; in ordinary results they didn't even have to scroll to it (carousels and image search are stricter).^[10]

Indexed

Google has stored the page and it's eligible to appear in results. It still has to rank to be seen.

Canonical

The one version Google treats as the main copy when several URLs show the same content. Search Console credits most data to it.

Next, chapter 2 sets up the property properly: the right property type, the right people with the right access, and the five settings to change on day one.

The basic set-up is in chapter 8 of SEO for beginners, with a step-by-step video. This chapter covers the decisions behind it, the ones that cause trouble a year later if you get them wrong.

Domain or URL-prefix property

Search Console has two kinds of website property. A Domain property covers every subdomain and protocol: http and https, www and non-www, m. and any other subdomain. A URL-prefix property covers only URLs that start with exactly the address you typed, protocol included.^[11]

Use a Domain property as your main one. If the www version of your site gets taken over or a test subdomain leaks into Google, a URL-prefix property for https://www. won't show it. A Domain property will. You can add URL-prefix properties for sections later; once a parent is verified, child properties you add are verified automatically with the same method.^[12]

One account can hold up to 1,000 properties,^[11] which is plenty even for an agency.

Verification methods

Verification proves you own the site. Google lists six methods:^[12]

Verification isn't a one-time event. Search Console checks from time to time that your token is still there, and if all verified owners lose access, everyone loses access to the property.^[12] That's why we'd always add a second verification method, such as the HTML tag next to the DNS record, from the property's Settings, Ownership verification page.

One useful detail: Google starts collecting data for a property as soon as anyone adds it, even before verification.^[12] So add the property the day the site goes live, even if the DNS step waits a day.

Users and permissions

Never share your Google password with an agency or freelancer. Add them as users instead, from Settings, then Users and permissions. Only owners can see that page and add people.^[13]

A property can have up to 100 users who aren't owners, and only owners can add users or link Google Analytics.^[13] To ask Google to recrawl a page through URL Inspection, someone must be an owner or a full user.^[14] Removing a delegated owner or user takes effect quickly; removing a verified owner also means deleting their token from the site, or they can verify again.^[13]

Five settings for day one

1. Submit your sitemap. Indexing, then Sitemaps. Paste the sitemap address and click Submit.^[5] Chapter 4 explains what the statuses mean.
2. Check Search generative AI. In Settings, Search generative AI, the default is to include your site in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features (a URL-prefix property inherits its parent's choice). Make sure nobody switched it to exclude by mistake.^[15] Chapter 7 covers it.
3. Link GA4. Settings, Associations, lets you connect Google Analytics, YouTube channels and other Google services to the property.^[7] Only an owner can link Google Analytics.^[13] The GA4 guide shows the link from the GA4 side.
4. Start the bulk data export if you'll ever want long history. Search Console keeps 16 months of Performance data.^[16] The BigQuery export keeps data for as long as you let it, but it only starts from the day you set it up and doesn't fill in the past.^[17] Chapter 7 has the steps.
5. Add your first annotation. Right-click the Performance chart on today's date and write "Search Console set up" (up to 120 characters).^[18] From now on, annotate every change you make to the site.

Then add the same site to Bing Webmaster Tools. It can import your sites straight from Search Console in a few clicks.^[19]

Platform properties for your social accounts

If the business posts on YouTube or Instagram, add those accounts too. Open the property selector, click Add property, and pick the platform; verification happens through a website property you already own or by logging in to the platform. Data takes a few days to appear, and the default date range is 28 days.^[3] A Kanpur sweet shop with a busy Instagram page will see which posts Google shows for searches like "kaju katli near me", and that's a content idea list in itself.

Before chapter 3, run the SSL Checker on your domain: the HTTPS report in chapter 5 flags invalid certificates, and it's quicker to catch them now. Then open the Performance report, which is where most of your time in Search Console will go.

Most of your time in Search Console goes here. Guide 2's measuring chapter explains how to report these numbers to a client. This chapter is about using the report itself: every metric, every filter, and the traps in how Google counts.

The four metrics

• Clicks: how many times someone clicked through to your site from Google Search.
• Impressions: how many times your site appeared in results.
• CTR: clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: the average position of your topmost result. In the chart it's for your whole site; in the table it's for that query, page or row.^[20]

The default view is the last three months.^[20] The longest is 16 months.^[16] Google's own advice on position is worth repeating: focus on trends in impressions and clicks more than on position alone.^[21]

On this site, 10,700 clicks came from 745,000 impressions over three months, a CTR of about 1.4%. The average position of 26.7 looks poor, but it averages every search the site appeared for, including thousands on page three. A single page can rank third for its main search and still drag that average down with long-tail impressions. Read the trend lines first, the totals second, position last.

Dimensions: the tabs under the chart

The table groups data by one dimension at a time: Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search appearance or Dates.^[20] A few rules that change what you see:

• Pages are the final URL after redirects, and most data is credited to the canonical URL. If someone clicks a duplicate, the click counts for the canonical.^[22]
• Search appearance shows rich result types, such as review snippets, merchant listings and videos, and only the types your site has impressions for.^[22] FAQ and how-to rich results now sit in Google's list of deprecated fields, with no data for recent dates.^[22]
• Dates are in Pacific Time, except in the 24-hour view, which uses your browser's time zone.^[22] For an Indian site that means a Search Console "day" starts at about 12:30 or 1:30 in the afternoon IST, depending on US daylight saving. Daily numbers won't line up with GA4 set to Indian time. Weekly ones mostly will.

Search type: web, multimodal, image, video, news

The Search type filter at the top splits traffic by where it came from. Web is now in two parts. "Web: text-based" is ordinary typed searches. "Web: multimodal" is searches made with an image: Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, uploaded images and Chrome's image search.^[20] Google added the multimodal type on 24 September 2026.^[23] There's no query data for multimodal searches, because most of them start from a picture, not words.^[22] If you sell sarees, shoes or anything people photograph in a shop and search for later, check it.

How Google counts: property versus page

This is the trap that confuses most people. The chart counts by property. If three of your pages show for one search, that's one impression and the position is your best one. The table, when grouped by page or search appearance, counts each URL separately.^[24]

That example is Google's own.^[24] So CTR and position look better in the chart than in a page table. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions.

Why the table doesn't add up

Google gives four reasons the table totals differ from the chart:^[25]

1. Row limit. "The table can display a maximum of 1,000 rows." Long-tail rows beyond that are in the chart total but not the table.
2. Anonymised queries. Rare queries are left out of the query table to protect privacy, but stay in the chart totals unless you add a query filter.
3. Aggregation. Page and search appearance filters switch the counting method, as above.
4. Filter totals. A "contains" filter and its "doesn't contain" opposite won't add up to the unfiltered total.

Beyond anonymised queries, Google says it "stores and shows only the most important data rows".^[22] On a small site you'll barely notice. On a site with thousands of long-tail searches, a large share of query clicks can be missing from the table. Google doesn't publish what share, and it varies by site. Chapter 7 shows how to get more rows out.

Two more timing facts: new data usually appears after 2 to 3 days,^[25] and the newest days can be preliminary, shown as a dotted line, and change within hours.^[24] Don't panic about yesterday.

Filters: contains, regex and multiple values

Click "+ Add filter" and choose Queries or Pages. You can also click any table row to filter by it.^[26]

• Containing / not containing: one piece of text, not case-sensitive, otherwise exact, spaces included.
• Custom (regex): a regular expression in RE2 syntax. It matches anywhere in the text unless you use ^ or $, and it isn't case-sensitive unless you start with (?-i).
• Multiple pages or queries: pick several to match or exclude together. You can't filter by more than one search appearance at once.

All of that is from Google's filtering page.^[26] For several values, Google suggests separating them with a vertical bar inside brackets. Five patterns worth saving:

The long-search pattern is a quick way to spot conversational searches, the kind people now type into AI Mode. Chapter 7 links a fuller method. To exclude a pattern, choose "Doesn't match regex" instead.^[26]

The branded queries filter

Google added a filter that splits branded queries (your brand name, its misspellings, and products unique to you) from everything else. It's classified by an AI-assisted system, not by a keyword list, and it can sometimes get queries wrong. It has no effect on ranking.^[27] Launched in November 2025, it was open to all eligible sites from 11 March 2026. It works only on top-level properties, not on URL-path or subdomain properties, and only for sites with enough queries and impressions.^[27] If you don't see it, use the brand regex above.

Non-branded clicks are the honest measure of SEO work. Branded clicks mostly measure how well-known the business already is.

Compare: two periods, two countries, two devices

Open a filter (Date is easiest), choose Compare, set the two values and click Apply. The table gets a Difference column. You can only run one comparison at a time.^[26] Since December 2025 you can switch the chart from Daily to Weekly or Monthly, which Google recommends for comparisons because it removes the weekday-versus-weekend mismatch.^[28] Weeks run Sunday to Saturday.^[22]

Find quick wins: queries on the edge of page one

The fastest clicks usually come from searches where you already sit between positions 5 and 15. Google suggests a related check: queries with high impressions and low CTR, where a better title and description can help.^[22]

Annotations

Annotations are notes pinned to a date on the chart. Right-click the chart, pick the date, type up to 120 characters and click Add. A property can have 200 annotations, they're deleted after 500 days, and they can't be edited, only deleted and re-added. Owners and full users can add them; restricted users can only see them. They don't show in comparison mode or the 24-hour view.^[18] Search Console also adds its own system annotations when there's a data problem on Google's side, which saves you chasing a drop that isn't real.^[18]

Annotations count as business data shared with everyone on the property, so Google asks you not to put names, phone numbers or addresses in them.^[18]

The 24-hour view and AI-powered configuration

Choose "24 hours" in the date filter to see hourly data with only a few hours' delay.^[29] It's useful the day you publish a news-led post or a festival offer.

Some accounts also have an experimental AI helper: click the filter icon in the report header and type a request such as "compare mobile clicks this quarter to the same quarter last year". It sets the filters, comparisons and metrics for you to confirm. It can't sort or export, it's limited to 20 requests per user per day, and only a small share of users have it.^[26] Google's own warning: check the filters it applied, because it can misread requests.^[30]

Sharing and exporting

The Share button gives a link to the current view only; it doesn't give access to the rest of the property.^[20] Export downloads the chart and table, with "~" or "-" values written as zeros.^[24] Since the table holds at most 1,000 rows, so does the table part of the export.

Next, chapter 4 moves from "how do people find me" to "can Google find me": the Pages report, URL Inspection, Sitemaps and Removals.

"Why isn't my page on Google?" is the question most small business owners start with. Search Console usually has the answer, in plain words, if you know which report to open. Start with URL Inspection for a single page and the Pages report for the whole site.

URL Inspection: one page, two views

Paste a full URL into the search bar at the top of any Search Console screen, or click the Inspect icon next to a URL in most reports. The URL must belong to the property you have open.^[31]

The first result is not a live test. It's what Google stored the last time it indexed the page. The verdict reads one of these:^[31]

• URL is on Google: indexed and eligible to show. Google adds that this "doesn't guarantee that your page is appearing in Search results".
• URL is on Google, but has issues: indexed, but something such as broken structured data may stop rich results.
• URL is not on Google: it won't show in results. The reason is in the Page indexing section.

Open Page indexing for the details that matter. Discovery shows how Google found the page (sitemaps and a referring page). Crawl shows the last crawl date, mobile or desktop, whether robots.txt allowed it and whether the fetch worked. Indexing shows whether indexing was allowed, and two canonicals: the one you declared and the one Google chose.^[31] When those two canonicals differ, Google is telling you it thinks another URL is the main copy.

Click Test live URL to fetch the page as it is now. Use it after a fix. The live test checks whether Google can crawl and read the page, with a screenshot and the rendered HTML under View tested page. It doesn't check duplicates, quality, manual actions or removals, so a pass isn't a promise of indexing.^[31] For JavaScript-heavy pages, the rendered HTML is the quickest way to see what Google sees; Guide 3's rendering chapter goes deeper.

Request indexing, and its limits

After a live test, click Request indexing to put the page in Google's queue. Google says indexing "typically takes only a day or so" but can take much longer, a request doesn't guarantee indexing, and there's a daily limit per property.^[31] Requesting the same URL again won't make it faster.^[14]

Google doesn't publish the daily limit in the interface. For the API, the URL Inspection quota is 2,000 calls a day and 600 a minute per site,^[32] but that's for inspecting, not for requesting indexing. For many pages at once, Google's answer is a sitemap with accurate lastmod dates.^[31]

The Pages report

Indexing, then Pages, shows every URL Google knows in your property, split into Indexed and Not indexed, with a table titled "Why pages aren't indexed".^[4] Each row has a reason, a source (Website or Google) and a validation state. Google's advice is to prioritise rows where the source is "Website" and validation is "failed" or "not started".^[4]

Before you read it, take in two of Google's warnings. You shouldn't expect every URL to be indexed, only the canonical version of every important page. And non-indexed URLs "can be fine".^[4] A WordPress shop with 60 products can easily show 400 not-indexed URLs from tags, filters, feeds and attachment pages, and that's normal.

Every reason, and what to do about it

These are the reasons Google lists, with its meaning in short and what we'd do.^[4]

Two more appear as warnings in an "Improve page experience" table. "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" means Google indexed a page it couldn't crawl, from links pointing at it; to keep it out, unblock it and use noindex. "Page indexed without content" means Google indexed the URL but couldn't read the content.^[4]

Guide 3 covers the fixes behind several of these rows in depth: status codes, canonicals, redirects and noindex, and crawl budget for large sites.

Validate fix

When you've fixed every instance of an issue, open its row and click Validate fix. Search Console checks a few pages at once, then works through the affected URLs only, not the whole site. It usually takes up to about two weeks, sometimes longer, and you get emails as it goes. If one URL still has the issue, validation fails and you fix and restart.^[4] You don't have to validate: Google updates the counts on its normal crawl anyway. Validation just gives you a log and an email.

Two filters make the report more useful. The sitemap drop-down above the chart shows "All submitted pages" or one specific sitemap, which tells you whether the pages you care about are indexed. And Google's tip for faster validation is to submit a sitemap of only your most important pages and filter by it before you click Validate.^[4]

The example list under each reason shows at most 1,000 URLs, and 404 rows only show URLs from the past month.^[4] You can't search for one URL in this report; that's what URL Inspection is for.

Sitemaps

The Sitemaps report lists every sitemap submitted through it or the API, with a status for the last read:^[5]

• Success: read with no errors; the URLs are queued for crawling.
• Has errors: read in part; click it for the error list.
• Couldn't fetch: Google couldn't get the file at all. Test the sitemap URL with a live URL Inspection and check that Page fetch says "Successful".

Things the report doesn't do: it won't show sitemaps Google found only through robots.txt, it shows no data for image, video or news URLs, and it lists at most 1,000 submissions. Deleting a sitemap from the report doesn't make Google forget its URLs.^[5] If a fetch keeps failing, Google retries for a few days, then stops, so fix it and resubmit.^[5]

The useful number is "Discovered pages". Compare it with the indexed count for that sitemap in the Pages report. If a sitemap lists 300 product pages and only 90 are indexed, you've found your problem section.

Removals

The Removals tool hides a URL from Google Search, fast but only for about six months. It doesn't stop Google crawling, and it doesn't delete anything from the web.^[33] Under Temporary Removals, New Request, there are two options:

• Temporarily remove URL: one exact URL, or every URL with a prefix. Both www and non-www, http and https are covered; other subdomains such as m. aren't.
• Clear snippet in search: wipes the description until Google indexes the page again. Use it after removing sensitive text from a page.

A request usually takes up to a day.^[33] To make a removal permanent, delete the page so it returns 404 or 410, put it behind a password, or add noindex, and don't rely on robots.txt.^[33] Google is clear about what not to use it for: cleaning up old 404s, fixing duplicate versions of your site, or starting over after buying a domain (Google's words: "start from scratch").^[33]

The tool's other tabs are Outdated content, which lists requests other people filed with Google's Remove Outdated Content tool about your pages, and SafeSearch Filtering, which lists requests to label your content as adult.^[33] If a SafeSearch report is wrong, that tab is where you'll see it first.

Chapter 5 turns to how pages perform for visitors: Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, rich results, and the two reports you hope stay empty.

These reports answer a different question from chapters 3 and 4. Not "do people find me" or "can Google index me", but "is the page good and safe enough to show". You'll look at most of them once a month. Two of them, manual actions and security, you hope never to need.

Core Web Vitals

The report uses field data: real Chrome users' visits, collected in the Chrome UX Report (CrUX). It groups similar pages and gives each group the status of its worst metric, separately for mobile and desktop.^[34]

Thresholds from Google's report page.^[34] Each group value is what 75% of visits reached or bettered over the last 28 days. A few things catch people out:^[34]

• "No data available" is common for small Indian sites. A group needs a minimum amount of CrUX data for both LCP and CLS, or it's left out.
• Groups, not pages. The report isn't meant for checking one URL. For that, use PageSpeed Insights, which strips URL parameters and may show different numbers.
• Data is credited to the actual URL, not the canonical, unlike most other reports.
• Fixes take four weeks to show. "Start Tracking" begins a 28-day watch of CrUX data. It doesn't trigger a recrawl.
• All locations are mixed. Visitors on slow mobile networks pull the whole group down.

Guide 3 explains what moves each metric in its Core Web Vitals chapter, and our PageSpeed Insights guide covers the per-page tests.

Our Website Speed Test measures server response, page weight, requests, compression, caching and render-blocking files. It's a lab check from our server, so use it to find causes and the Core Web Vitals report to confirm that real visitors feel the change.

HTTPS

The HTTPS report counts indexed HTTP and HTTPS URLs and gives a reason for each http URL whose https version couldn't be indexed. It's available only for Domain properties and https URL-prefix properties.^[35] The goal is zero HTTP URLs. The errors it names:^[35]

• HTTP marked with canonical tag: the http page declares itself canonical. Point the canonical at https.
• HTTPS has invalid certificate: usually site-wide; renew or fix the certificate.
• Sitemap points to HTTP: update the sitemap to https URLs.
• HTTPS has redirect: the https URL redirects back to http.
• HTTPS URL is roboted: robots.txt blocks the https version.
• HTTPS not evaluated: no https twin, Google chose http as canonical, too many errors, or not crawled yet. Fix the other errors first.

What happened to the Page experience report

There used to be a Page experience report that combined Core Web Vitals and HTTPS. Google removed it in November 2024, saying the Core Web Vitals and HTTPS reports "will continue to be available as they are".^[36] If an old tutorial tells you to open it, use those two reports instead.

Enhancements and Shopping: rich result reports

When Google finds supported structured data on your site, it adds a report for each type under Enhancements, or under Shopping for product snippets and merchant listings. Each report counts items, not pages, and splits them into valid and invalid, with critical issues in "Why items are invalid" and minor ones in "Improve item appearance".^[37] A report appears only if Google found valid markup of a supported type; the list includes breadcrumbs, events, job postings, merchant listings, product snippets, profile pages, recipes, review snippets and videos, among others.^[37]

The reports show a sample, not every item, so use URL Inspection or the Rich Results Test for a single page.^[37] Fix, then Validate fix, as in chapter 4. Our Rich Results Test guide covers testing, and Guide 3's structured data chapter covers markup across a whole site.

Online shops may also see Merchant opportunities, and owners and full users get a Shipping and returns setting under Settings, Shopping (if you have a Merchant Center account, link it to the property first).^[38] A D2C brand selling kurtas or skincare on its own site should fill in shipping and returns there if it hasn't done so in Merchant Center.

Sites with videos get a Video indexing report showing which watch pages have an indexed video and why the others don't.^[7] A common reason on business sites is that the video isn't on a watch page: a product page with a supporting video doesn't count, because Google only indexes videos whose page exists mainly to show that one video.^[31]

Manual actions

A manual action means a human reviewer at Google decided pages on your site break its spam policies. Some or all of the site can then be ranked lower or left out of results. You'll see it in the Manual actions report and the Search Console message centre.^[39] A clean site shows a green tick.

The report names the type and the affected pages, which can be a folder pattern such as /real-estate/* or "Affects all pages".^[39] The types Google lists include site abused with third-party spam, user-generated spam, spammy free host, structured data issue, unnatural links to your site, unnatural links from your site, thin content with little or no added value, major spam problems, cloaked images, AMP content mismatch, sneaky mobile redirects, news and Discover policy violations, and since 2026, back button hijacking.^[39] Google announced that last one on 13 April 2026 and began enforcing it on 15 June 2026.^[40]

Those steps follow Google's report page.^[39] If you bought a domain that was penalised before you owned it, say so in the request.^[39] Guide 3's chapter on spam policies, manual actions and recovery covers what reviewers look for, and how to tell a manual action from an algorithm update. Most traffic drops are the second kind, and those never show in this report.

Security issues

This report shows Google's findings if your site was hacked or could harm visitors. There are three kinds: hacked content, malware and unwanted software, and social engineering such as phishing.^[41] Affected pages can carry a warning in search results or a full-page browser warning. Google says to treat this report as the source of truth, even if you can't reproduce the warning yourself.^[41]

The example URLs are a sample. An issue can even appear with no examples, which doesn't mean no pages are affected.^[41] On WordPress sites we'd look at recently added admin users, plugins you don't recognise, and new pages in the sitemap you never wrote. Then clean up, update everything, and request a review from the report.

Chapter 6 covers the reports you'll open less often but should know: Links, Insights and the Settings page, including Crawl stats.

None of these is a daily report. But each answers one question nothing else in Search Console can, and two of them (Crawl stats and Change of Address) matter a great deal on the few days you need them.

The Links report

Links shows backlinks from other sites and links within your own. Google is clear that it's a sample, not every link: tables stop at 1,000 rows, duplicates are combined, and links may have since been removed.^[42] It also doesn't say whether a link is nofollow, and it groups sites by root domain, so www., m. and blog. all show as one.^[42]

The table follows Google's report page.^[42] The Export button on the main Links page gives two larger slices: "Latest links", up to 100,000 rows sorted by discovery date, and "More sample links", up to 100,000 more from the full set.^[42] That export is the best free list of your own backlinks you'll find anywhere.

A Delhi dental clinic might sort "Latest links" by date each month and look for new local directories, health portals or news mentions. A spike of links from unknown foreign domains with odd anchor text is usually noise; Google says it typically ignores links from known spam sites.^[42] Guide 2's link building chapter explains when disavowing is worth it (rarely).

What it can't do: show competitors' links, give a strength score, or show links Google hasn't counted. For those you need a link index such as Ahrefs or Semrush (chapter 8).

Insights and Achievements

Insights is the simple view, built for content creators and owners who aren't data people. It replaced the separate Search Console Insights beta on 30 June 2025.^[43] Its cards show:^[44]

• clicks and impressions for the chosen period
• your content: top pages, trending up and trending down
• queries leading to your site, the same way
• top countries
• branded versus non-branded traffic
• additional traffic sources such as Image, Video, News and Discover

"Trending" is ranked by the change in clicks, not the percentage.^[44] For sites with lots of queries, Insights groups similar queries together using AI,^[45] named after the best-performing query in each group.^[44] Smaller sites see a plain list. Click any item to jump into the Performance report already filtered to it.

For a shop owner who will open Search Console once a month, Insights is a fine place to start. Point them to it and spare them the Performance report.

Achievements are milestones by clicks, such as your first 50 clicks from Google Search in 28 days, which also arrive by email. Google notes they weren't "designed to reflect how Google's ranking systems work".^[46] Enjoy them; don't plan around them.

Crawl stats

Open Settings, then Crawl stats. It's only available for root-level properties: a Domain property or a URL-prefix property without a path.^[6] It shows total crawl requests, total download size, average response time and host status, then breaks requests down by response, file type, purpose and Googlebot type.^[6]

Host status is the part every site owner should glance at. It's green if Google hit no significant availability problems in the past 90 days, and it warns you if there was one, recent or older. The three checks behind it are robots.txt fetching, DNS resolution and server connectivity.^[6] On shared hosting, server connectivity is the check we'd watch most closely.

Other things to read in Crawl stats:

• Average response time rising week after week points to a slow server; check it against the dates of any hosting or plugin changes.
• By purpose: Discovery is new URLs, Refresh is recrawls of known ones.^[6] A new section with almost no Discovery requests isn't being found.
• By response: a jump in 404s, 5xx errors or redirects shows where Google is wasting requests.
• Hosts: on a Domain property, the top 20 child domains from the last 90 days each get their own view.^[6]

Crawl stats counts requests by the actual URL, follows each step of a redirect chain as a separate request, and doesn't yet count every request.^[6] For the full picture on large sites, use server logs, as Guide 3's crawling chapter shows.

The robots.txt report

Settings, robots.txt, shows the robots.txt files Google found for the top 20 hosts in the property, when each was last fetched, its size, and any parsing errors. You can view the last fetched version, earlier versions from the past 30 days, and request a recrawl of the file after an urgent fix.^[47] It's available only for Domain properties and URL-prefix properties without a path.

It tells you what Google read, not whether a given URL is blocked. To test URLs against the rules, use our Robots.txt Tester, which checks up to 10 URLs and shows the exact matching rule.

Change of Address

Use this only when you move to a new domain, for example from sharmasweets.co.in to sharmasweets.in. Don't use it for http to https, www to non-www, moving pages within a site, or changing hosts with the same URLs.^[48]

The requirements: 301 redirects from the old homepage and, ideally, every old page to its new address; owner access to both properties from the same Google account; and domain-level properties (it can't move a folder). It doesn't move subdomains below the domain you name, including www, so run it for each variant.^[48] Keep the redirects for at least 180 days, longer if the old URLs still get search traffic, and keep paying for the old domain for at least a year so nobody else buys it.^[48] Guide 3's site migrations chapter has the full plan.

The rest of Settings, briefly

• Ownership verification and Users and permissions: chapter 2.
• Associations: links to Google Analytics, YouTube channels, Android apps and other Google services.^[7]
• Bulk data export: chapter 7.
• Search generative AI: chapter 7.
• Shipping and returns: for online merchants; link Merchant Center first if you use it (chapter 5).

Next, chapter 7 covers the two newest parts of Search Console, the generative AI report and setting, and then how to get far more data out than the 1,000-row table allows.

Two different topics share this chapter because they meet in practice. Once you start asking "which of my pages show in AI answers, and for what?", the 1,000-row table runs out fast.

The generative AI performance report

Google launched separate generative AI reports for Search and Discover on 3 June 2026 and rolled them out to all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026.^[49] The Search report counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It doesn't include Search Labs experiments.^[50]

Sources: Google's help page^[50] and launch post.^[49] The report can be filtered by search type, "Web: text-based" or "Web: multimodal".^[50] The same data is still inside the normal Performance report under Web; this is a separate view of it, not extra traffic.^[49] The usual limits apply too, including the 1,000-row table.^[50]

If the report is missing, Google gives two likely reasons: too few AI impressions, or your site excluded through the Search generative AI setting.^[50]

How we'd use it: export the Pages table each month and set it beside the Pages tab of the Performance report for the same period. Pages with many AI impressions but falling clicks are pages where an AI answer may be doing the job your page used to do. Pages with good rankings and zero AI impressions are worth a look at how clearly they answer the question. Guide 5's measuring AI visibility chapter puts this report next to Bing's AI Performance, GA4 and a prompt log. Bing's report, unlike Google's, counts citations.^[51]

The Search generative AI setting

Settings, then Search generative AI, has three choices:^[15]

• Include (the default): your content can appear and be linked in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover.
• Exclude: your links and content won't appear or be used to ground AI answers in those features, and you get no traffic or impressions from them.
• Inherit control from parent: the default for child properties, which follow the nearest parent property that set its own choice.

Google says the setting isn't a ranking signal for the rest of Search, and that exclusion usually takes effect within one to two days, some content taking longer. It reached all sites on 31 August 2026.^[15] We'd leave it on Include for almost every business. Google notes that if you exclude your site, content from other sites still appears in those features and "may appear similar to yours".^[15] Excluding yourself mostly hands the space to competitors. The exceptions are publishers making a deliberate content licensing decision. Guide 5's technical access chapter covers how this setting relates to robots.txt and Google-Extended.

Why you'll want the data outside Search Console

The interface has three walls you'll hit as a site grows:

Each way out solves a different wall.

The Search Analytics API

The API's query method returns up to 25,000 rows per request (1,000 by default), and you page through results with a startRow offset.^[52] Google's own guide says the method exposes "a maximum of 50K rows of data per day per search type", sorted by clicks, and recommends querying one day at a time.^[53] Quotas are generous for one site: 1,200 queries a minute per site and per user for Search Analytics.^[32]

The API can also do two things the interface can't. It can group by query and page together, which is how you find cannibalisation (Guide 3's indexing controls chapter uses this). And it returns hourly data for up to 10 days, where the interface shows only the last 24 hours.^[29]

You don't have to write code. Crawlers such as Screaming Frog can pull Search Console data through the API for you (Guide 3, chapter 11). Guide 2's measuring chapter walks through Glenn Gabe's method for pulling queries through the API to spot AI Mode-style searches.

Data Studio

Google's free reporting tool connects to Search Console directly. You sign in with the same Google account, pick the property, and choose one of two tables: Site Impression (counted by property, like the chart) or URL Impression (counted by page, like the Pages table). One data source uses one table, so to see both, add two data sources to the report.^[54] That's the property-versus-page rule from chapter 3 again, and mixing the two up is the most common reason a Data Studio report "doesn't match Search Console".

For a monthly client report, Data Studio is where we'd start. Guide 2 shows a one-page layout with outcomes first.

BigQuery bulk export

The bulk export sends a daily copy of your Performance data to Google BigQuery: all the data Search Console has for the property, except anonymised queries.^[55] Data builds up for as long as you keep it, so it's also the answer to the 16-month limit. It can't go back in time: history before set-up has to come from the API or the reports.^[17]

Steps from Google's set-up page.^[17] On cost: BigQuery's free tier covers the first 10 GiB of storage and the first 1 TiB of query processing each month.^[56] A small business site's Search Console data is unlikely to reach that for a long time, but billing must be switched on, so set a budget alert in Google Cloud.

Before your first export, take a baseline of the site with our Free Website Audit, so the numbers you start collecting have a technical snapshot beside them. Chapter 8 covers what all of this costs (mostly nothing), what Search Console can't do, and when a paid tool earns its fee.

There's no paid version of Search Console. Every report in this guide is free, for every site you can verify. So the real question isn't "free or paid", it's "what does Search Console not do, and is that worth paying for?"

What's free, and the limits that come with it

And the limits no setting fixes: you only see sites you've verified, you see Google and nothing else, and average position is an average, not a rank for a set city and device.

What paid tools add on top

Paid SEO suites don't know more about your own site than Google does. What they add is everything outside it:

• Competitors. Their keywords, top pages and estimated traffic. Search Console can't show anyone else's site.
• A full link index. Links to any site, with strength scores, lost and new links, and competitor links to copy.
• Fixed-list rank tracking. Daily positions for 500 to 2,000 chosen keywords, in a chosen location and device.
• Site crawls. Every URL checked for broken links, titles, redirects and canonicals, whether Google crawled it or not.
• Keyword volumes for searches you don't rank for yet.
• AI visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity and others, which Search Console doesn't cover.

Here's what the main suites charge, read from their own pricing pages on 16 October 2026. None of them showed an Indian rupee price, so we give US dollars with "about ₹" at ₹96 to US$1, the X-Rates average for 1 to 16 October 2026.^[57] We have no affiliate links with any of them.

The yearly prices are per month, paid for the year upfront. Our Ahrefs, Semrush and SE Ranking guides go plan by plan, and Ahrefs vs Semrush compares the two big ones.

Our view: a local business with a 20 to 50 page site doesn't need any of these. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, a free crawler and a free Ahrefs account cover it. Pay when you're doing SEO for clients, competing in a crowded online market, or reporting fixed keyword positions to someone who insists on them.

Alternatives and companions

Nothing replaces Search Console for Google data about your own site. These sit beside it. Start with our own free tools for the checks Search Console doesn't do on demand:

Our best free SEO tools guide lists every free option by job.

A monthly routine, in 20 minutes

1. Overview: any manual action or security issue? Any new recommendation?
2. Performance: last 28 days against the previous period, weekly view, non-branded. Note the top three gains and losses by page.
3. Generative AI report: export the pages table and save it with the month's date.
4. Pages: any new "Why pages aren't indexed" row with source Website? Any jump in a row you already had?
5. Core Web Vitals: any group moved to Poor on mobile?
6. Crawl stats: host status still green?
7. Annotate: add a note for every change you made to the site this month.

If that routine turns up more than you have time to fix, our SEO service can take it over, or you can get a quote. Otherwise, check what stuck with the 10-question quiz below, then carry on to our GA4 guide, the next in this path.

Test yourself

Ten questions on the whole guide. Pick an answer, check it, and see your score at the end.

Frequently asked questions

Short answers to the questions people ask most about Google Search Console.

Sources