Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the free tool Google uses to show you how it sees your website. Where analytics tools tell you what visitors do on your site, Search Console shows what happens before that: which searches you appear for, how often people click and whether Google can find and include your pages at all.

For any small business with a website, it is one of the first tools you set up. You verify that you own the domain, and from then on Google collects data about your performance in the search results and about technical issues that stand in the way of your visibility. You can also give several colleagues or your web developer access, each with their own permissions.

What insights can you get from it?

Search Console consists of several sections, each shedding light on a different part of your visibility:

• Performance: impressions, clicks, average position and CTR per search query, page, country and device.
• Pages: which URLs are in the index and why others aren't. This is your window on indexing.
• URL Inspection: how Google sees one specific page, with the option to request indexing again.
• Sitemaps: this is where you submit your sitemap and see whether Google processes it correctly.
• Experience and enhancements: signals about Core Web Vitals and about structured data Google recognises on your pages.

How do you use it in practice?

Say an accountancy firm in London sees in the performance report that its page on corporation tax gets lots of impressions but few clicks. The average position is reasonable, the CTR low. That often points to a title and description that don't match what searchers expect. After writing a clearer title and a description that answers the searcher's question, the firm can track in the same tool whether the number of clicks changes.

A second typical use: after launching a new website, checking that no important pages have accidentally been set to noindex or are suddenly being reported as 404s.

Search Console and AI search

According to Google, clicks and impressions from Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in the regular performance report, but not shown separately. So you can't simply filter on AI answers. What Search Console does show is whether your pages are correctly indexed, and that is a prerequisite for appearing as a source in those answers. Search Console offers no data on visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini; for that, you need other measurements.

A simple routine

1. Check the Pages report every week for new indexing problems.
2. Compare your performance every month with the previous period and with the same time last year.
3. Look for pages with lots of impressions and a low CTR, and improve their title and description.
4. Combine the data with Google Analytics 4 to see which search terms lead to enquiries.

Want to follow your search performance and your mentions in AI assistants together in one overview? See how you can track your visibility in Google and AI search without switching between tools every week.