Google Search Console

Everything so far in this course has been about what you do to a site. Google Search Console is how you find out whether any of it worked. It is free, it is the only source of this data, and it reports things nothing else can tell you.

Setting It Up

Add your site as a property and prove you control it. The verification options are:

DNS record — add a TXT record at your domain registrar. Verifies the whole domain including all subdomains, which is why it is generally the best choice.
HTML file — upload a file to your site root.
HTML tag — add a meta tag to your homepage.
Google Analytics or Tag Manager — if either is already installed.

http:// and https://, and www and non-www, count as separate properties unless you verify at the domain level with DNS. A common source of confusion is looking at a property that receives none of your actual traffic and concluding the site has no visitors.

The Performance Report

This is the one most people use, and it answers questions no other tool can:

Queries — the actual phrases people searched before seeing your site. This is real data, not an estimate, and it regularly reveals terms you never targeted.
Impressions — how often your pages appeared in results.
Clicks — how often someone clicked through.
Average position — where you typically appeared.

The most useful pattern to look for: pages with many impressions and few clicks. Those are ranking but not being chosen — usually a title and meta description problem, which is a much easier fix than trying to rank higher.

The Pages Report

This is where the crawling-versus-indexing distinction from earlier becomes concrete. It splits your URLs into indexed and not-indexed, and for the not-indexed ones it gives a reason — discovered but not crawled, crawled but not indexed, blocked by robots.txt, marked noindex, duplicate without a canonical, and so on.

When a page is not appearing in search, this report tells you which of those situations you are in, which determines the fix.

Other Reports Worth Knowing

Report	Tells you
Sitemaps	Whether your sitemap was read, and how many of its URLs were indexed
Core Web Vitals	Real-visitor speed data, grouped into good / needs improvement / poor
Enhancements	Whether your structured data is valid and which rich results it qualifies for
Links	Which sites link to you, and which of your pages they link to
Manual actions	Whether a human reviewer has penalised the site — normally empty, and worth checking if traffic collapses

The URL Inspection Tool

Paste any URL from your site and it reports that specific page: whether it is indexed, when it was last crawled, which canonical Google chose, whether the mobile version renders correctly, and any structured data found. It also offers a "Request indexing" button, which nudges a new or updated page into the crawl queue.

Set it up sooner rather than later

Search Console only reports data from the point of verification onward — it does not backfill history. That makes setting it up an early task rather than one you get to eventually. A site running for two years without it has two years of unrecoverable data.