Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows how your website performs in Google Search. It tells you which searches show your pages and how often people click, which of your pages are in Google's index and why the others are not, and whether Google found problems such as hacked content or a manual penalty. It is also where you tell Google about your site: you submit your sitemap and ask Google to crawl a page. You add your site, prove that you own it, and Search Console starts reporting.
Search Console used to be called Google Webmaster Tools; Google renamed it in 2015. Below is what it does, report by report, what it cannot do, and what it showed across the 1,513 sites connected to IndexMachine.
What is Google Search Console used for?
Google Search Console is used to see your site the way Google sees it, and to act on what you find. In practice, site owners use it to:
- See search traffic. Which queries show your pages, how many impressions and clicks each one gets, and your average position.
- Check indexing. How many of your pages are in Google's index, and the reason for every page that is not.
- Tell Google about pages. Submit sitemaps and ask Google to crawl a new or updated page.
- Find and fix problems. Pages Google cannot fetch, slow pages, broken structured data, security issues and manual actions.
- Get alerts. Search Console emails the site's owners and users when it detects new issues.
- See links. Which sites link to you, and which of your pages get the most links, internal and external.
- Remove a URL from results quickly. For example, a page published by mistake.
Google's own getting started guide for Search Console puts it this way: the tool helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results. You do not need it to appear on Google, but without it you are guessing about all of the above.
What does Google Search Console do? The main reports
Search Console is organized as a left-hand menu of reports. These are the ones every site owner meets, where to find them, and what each one tells you:
| Report | Where in the menu | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Search results | Performance | Queries, pages, countries and devices with clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position, for the last 16 months. |
| URL inspection | Search bar at the top, or URL inspection | For one URL: indexed or not and why, last crawl, the canonical Google chose. Test the live page and ask Google to crawl it. |
| Pages | Indexing | How many URLs are indexed, and every reason why the others are not. |
| Sitemaps | Indexing | Submit sitemaps, see whether Google read them and how many URLs it found. |
| Removals | Indexing | Hide a URL from Google's results for about six months while you fix or remove it. |
| Core Web Vitals | Experience | Real-user loading speed, responsiveness and layout stability, by group of similar URLs. |
| HTTPS | Experience | Which indexed pages are served over HTTPS and which are not. |
| Enhancements | Enhancements or Shopping | Structured data Google found (breadcrumbs, products, videos and more) and its errors. |
| Manual actions and Security issues | Security & Manual Actions | Penalties applied by a human reviewer, and hacked content or malware. |
| Links | Links | Top linking sites, top linked pages and internal links. |
| Crawl stats and robots.txt | Settings | Googlebot's requests per day, response codes and the robots.txt files Google fetched. |
Three of these do most of the work.
The Performance report is the traffic side. It is the only place that shows the actual search queries behind your Google traffic, with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for each. Filter by page to see what a single page ranks for, or compare two date ranges to see what changed.
The Page indexing report (Indexing, Pages) is the coverage side. It splits your known URLs into indexed and not indexed, and lists the reasons in a table called Why pages aren't indexed: "Discovered - currently not indexed", "Crawled - currently not indexed", "Excluded by 'noindex' tag", "Soft 404" and more. Click a reason to see example URLs and, after a fix, Validate Fix.
URL Inspection is the one-page view. Paste any URL from your site into the search bar at the top to see Google's indexed version of it, run a live test, and click Request indexing. Our URL Inspection tool guide explains every field on that screen.
Is Google Search Console free?
Yes. Google Search Console is completely free, for any number of sites, and there is no paid version. Google does not charge for crawling, indexing or ranking, and nothing in Search Console is sold as an upgrade. All you need is a Google account and proof that you own or manage the site.
Google Search Console vs Google Analytics
They answer different questions. Search Console covers what happens in Google Search before someone clicks. Google Analytics covers what visitors do on your site after they arrive.
| Google Search Console | Google Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Your site's presence in Google Search | Visitor behavior on your site |
| Key numbers | Impressions, clicks, CTR, average position, indexed pages | Users, sessions, engagement, conversions |
| Traffic it covers | Google Search only | Every source: search, social, ads, email, direct |
| Shows search queries | Yes | No, apart from what it imports from Search Console |
| How you set it up | Verify that you own the site | Add a tracking tag to every page |
| Price | Free | Free (standard version) |
Most sites use both, and you can link them so Analytics shows Search Console's query data next to its own.
Who needs Google Search Console?
Anyone who has a website and wants it found on Google: bloggers, local businesses, online stores, SaaS companies, developers launching a side project, and the agencies and SEOs who work for them. If people search for what your site offers, Search Console is where you see whether they find it.
It also scales to teams. Under Settings, Users and permissions, an owner can add other people as Full users (who see all data and can take most actions) or Restricted users (who mostly view data), without sharing a password.
How to set up Google Search Console
Setup takes about ten minutes:
- Go to Google Search Console and sign in with your Google account.
- Click Add property and choose Domain (covers every version of your site, verified with a DNS record) or URL prefix (one exact address, with more ways to verify: an HTML file, an HTML tag, Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager).
- Verify ownership and leave the record or tag in place afterward.
- Open Sitemaps under Indexing, enter your sitemap URL under Add a new sitemap and click Submit.
Reports start to fill in over the next few days. If your site is brand new, our guide on how to get your website on Google covers the full launch sequence, from making the site crawlable to the first links.
What Search Console shows on a typical site
Here is what the Page indexing data looks like across many sites. We looked at the sites connected to IndexMachine: on October 31, 2026, about 1.17 million sitemap URLs on 1,513 sites, each with its latest state in Google's URL Inspection data. Instead of counting URLs, we counted sites: how many had at least one sitemap URL in each state. Aggregate counts only, with no site or URL named. These sites belong to people who signed up for an indexing tool, so they lean toward sites with indexing trouble, and some results are days or weeks old. Most of these sites are on free accounts, where IndexMachine has not requested anything yet, so the numbers show where sites stand before indexing is turned on.
| State in Search Console | Sites with at least one sitemap URL in it | Share of the 1,513 sites |
|---|---|---|
| Submitted and indexed | 1,361 | 90.0% |
| URL is unknown to Google | 1,185 | 78.3% |
| Crawled - currently not indexed | 719 | 47.5% |
| Discovered - currently not indexed | 703 | 46.5% |
| Excluded by 'noindex' tag | 157 | 10.4% |
| Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user | 139 | 9.2% |
| Page with redirect | 122 | 8.1% |
| Not found (404) | 81 | 5.4% |
| Alternate page with proper canonical tag | 61 | 4.0% |
| Server error (5xx) | 51 | 3.4% |
| Soft 404 | 44 | 2.9% |
| Blocked by robots.txt | 17 | 1.1% |
What that means for your own site:
- Expect issues. 1,312 of the 1,513 sites (86.7%) had at least one sitemap URL that Search Console reported as not indexed. Only 155 (10.2%) had every inspected URL indexed.
- Most of the gap is waiting, not errors. The most common states were "URL is unknown to Google" and the two "currently not indexed" states. Each means Google has not crawled the page yet or chose not to keep it, not that the page is broken.
- Errors are less common, but real. About one site in ten had pages excluded by noindex, and one in twenty had 404s in its sitemap. Rarer states like Soft 404 have their own fixes; our guide to soft 404 errors covers one of them.
- The median site had 28.3% of its sitemap URLs indexed. Search Console shows you that number. It does not change it.
What Google Search Console can't do
Search Console reports; it does not do the work. Its limits:
- It does not index your pages. Request indexing in URL Inspection is a request, one URL at a time, with a daily quota per property, and Google still decides whether to index the page.
- It does not track rankings for you. Position is an average over the searches where your page appeared, and you only see searches where you did appear.
- It does not show every query. Google leaves out rare queries to protect searchers' privacy, and tables in the interface show up to 1,000 rows.
- It is not real time. Performance data arrives with a delay, and the Page indexing report is refreshed more slowly than URL Inspection.
- It only covers Google. Bing has its own Bing Webmaster Tools, and Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and other engines accept new URLs through IndexNow.
- It works one site at a time. With many sites, you switch property by property.
- It does not show competitors. You only see data for sites you have verified.
How IndexMachine builds on Google Search Console
The gap between what Search Console shows and what it does is the work IndexMachine automates. Sign in with Google and it imports every site you have verified in Search Console. It shows the coverage state, last Google crawl, clicks and impressions of every page in your sitemaps in one table.
Then it does the part Search Console leaves to you. Its Chrome extension presses Google's own Request indexing button in your Search Console, on autopilot, every day, for the pages Google has not indexed yet, using your full daily Google quota on every site. Pages Google already shows as indexed are skipped, so no quota is wasted. Every requested page is tracked until it is on Google, and pages that drop out of the index are requested again automatically. Every other engine gets unlimited IndexNow, and you get 404 alerts, daily reports in the dashboard and a weekly email report. If you are weighing it against Search Console on its own, here is how IndexMachine compares with Google Search Console.
Turn Search Console data into indexed pages
Create a free IndexMachine account and sign in with Google: it imports every Search Console site you have and shows which pages Google has not indexed, page by page. Turn on daily Request Indexing in your own Search Console plus unlimited IndexNow when you want them on Google.
FAQs
What is Google Search Console in simple terms?
It is Google's free dashboard for website owners. It shows how your site appears in Google Search (searches, clicks, positions), which of your pages Google has indexed, and any problems Google found, and it lets you submit your sitemap and ask Google to crawl pages.
Do I need Google Search Console if I already use Google Analytics?
Yes. Analytics shows what visitors do after they reach your site, but not the searches that brought them, which pages Google has indexed, or why a page is missing from Google. Only Search Console shows those.
Does Google Search Console improve SEO?
Not by itself. Adding your site does not change rankings. What it gives you is information: which pages are not indexed and why, which queries you almost rank for, and which errors to fix. The SEO gains come from acting on that.
Who can see my Google Search Console data?
Only verified owners of the property and the users they add under Users and permissions. The data is not public, and other site owners cannot see it.
How long does Google Search Console take to show data?
Reports usually start to fill in within a few days after you verify your site. The Performance report then keeps 16 months of history, and indexing data updates as Google crawls your pages.