Google Search Console Guide, Report by Report

This Google Search Console guide covers the free tool Google gives site owners to see how their site performs in Google Search: which queries and pages earn impressions and clicks, which URLs are indexed and why others are not, and what errors Google hit along the way. It walks through each report in the order you should read it, with the one question each report answers and the filters that make it useful.

It is written for owners, marketers and developers who have Search Console set up but mostly look at the top-line chart. If you have not verified a site yet, the first section covers that too.

On this page

• What is Google Search Console?
• Domain or URL-prefix: setting up the property
• The Performance report: what the four metrics mean
• Regex filters that answer real questions
• Page indexing and URL Inspection
• Sitemaps, Core Web Vitals and links
• How do AI Overviews show up in Search Console?
• A monthly Google Search Console routine

What is Google Search Console?

Search Console is Google’s free reporting and diagnostics tool for websites. Google’s getting started page describes it as a way to see “how Google crawls, indexes, and serves websites,” and sets expectations that are refreshingly low-maintenance: there is “no need to sign in to the tool every day,” because Google emails you when it finds new issues. It suggests checking “around once every month, or when you make changes to the site’s content.”

Google’s own four-step start is the right order:

1. Verify site ownership.
2. Make sure Google can find and read your pages (the Page indexing report).
3. Consider submitting a sitemap.
4. Monitor performance in the Search results report.

Every report below maps to one of those steps. The map shows which question each report answers, so you know where to go when something looks wrong.

Scroll the diagram sideways to see all of it.

Domain or URL-prefix: setting up the property

Choose a Domain property if you can edit DNS. Google’s property types help page explains the difference:

• A Domain property (example.com) aggregates “all subdomains, protocols, and subpaths”: http and https, www, m. and any other subdomain, in one view. It can only be verified by a DNS record.
• A URL-prefix property (https://www.example.com/) includes only URLs that start with that exact prefix, protocol included. It supports several verification methods, such as an HTML file or meta tag.

The Domain property is the honest view of your whole site. The URL-prefix property is useful as a second property for one section, such as /blog/, or when you cannot touch DNS. Add both if you can; they do not conflict. Once verified, give colleagues access through user permissions rather than sharing a login.

The Performance report: what the four metrics mean

The Performance report shows clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for the last three months by default. Google’s Performance report documentation defines each:

• Clicks: times a user clicked through to your site from Google Search.
• Impressions: times your site appeared in results.
• CTR: clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: the average position of your topmost result.

You can group the table by Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search appearance or Dates, and filter by search type: Web, Image, Video or News.

The trap is aggregation. The chart counts by property; the table counts by page when you group by Pages or Search appearance. Google’s notes on the data give an example worth memorizing: three pages from one site appear for “fun pets for children” and one user clicks all three. The two views report different numbers for the same event:

Scroll the diagram sideways to see all of it.

So when the chart says CTR is 5% and the page table seems lower, nothing is broken. Compare like with like: property totals with property totals, page rows with page rows. Our guide to CTR in SEO covers what a healthy CTR looks like by position and why.

Regex filters that answer real questions

Regex turns the Performance report from a list into an answer. Add a filter, choose Queries or Pages, pick “Custom (regex),” and enter a pattern. Google’s filtering documentation sets the rules: Search Console uses RE2 syntax, matching is partial by default (anchor with ^ or $), and it is not case-sensitive unless you prepend (?-i).

Five patterns we use on almost every audit:

Question-style and long queries deserve their own view. In our experience they are where an on-page AI answer can most easily satisfy a searcher without a click, so tracking them separately shows where that may be happening. The anatomy of the first pattern is below.

Scroll the diagram sideways to see all of it.

Pair any regex with the Compare option to put two date ranges side by side. That is the setup Google recommends after a core update: the week after completion against the week before the rollout began.

Page indexing and URL Inspection

The Page indexing report answers “which of my pages can appear at all?” Google’s Page indexing documentation is blunt about who needs it: if your site has fewer than 500 pages, “you probably don’t need to use this report,” and site: searches will tell you enough. For larger sites, it lists every URL Google knows about as indexed or not indexed, with a reason for each exclusion.

Two rules keep this report from causing panic:

• Not indexed is often correct. Google says it is fine for URLs to be excluded by robots.txt, noindex, or because they are duplicates. Check the reason, not the count.
• Indexed does not mean shown. An indexed page still has to rank for something.

For any single URL, use URL Inspection. It shows the indexed status, the Google-selected canonical, the rendered page and loaded resources, and lets you run a live test and request indexing. Know the limits of the live test, too. Google’s URL Inspection documentation lists what it does not check: whether the page meets quality and security guidelines, whether the site has a manual action, and whether the URL is subject to a removal. A green live test means Google can fetch and parse the page, not that it will rank. The canonical field is the one people miss: if Google picked a different canonical than you declared, the page you care about is not the one being ranked. Our canonical tag guide covers how to fix that, and technical SEO issues lists the common causes of exclusion.

Sitemaps, Core Web Vitals and links

These three reports are checks, not dashboards. Open them when something changes.

Sitemaps. Submitting a sitemap tells Google where the file is; you cannot upload one. Google’s Sitemaps help says small sites of “about 500 pages or fewer” that link every page from the homepage probably do not need one, and that not every URL in a sitemap is guaranteed to be crawled. The report shows fetch status and errors. Our XML sitemap guide covers what belongs in the file.

Core Web Vitals. This report groups URLs as Good, Need improvement or Poor for LCP, INP and CLS, using real-user field data. Only indexed URLs appear, and groups without enough data are omitted. The thresholds come from web.dev: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile. Details are in Core Web Vitals explained.

Links. Shows top linked pages, top linking sites and top link text. It is a sample, capped at 1,000 rows per table, grouped by root domain, and it does not say whether a link is nofollow. Use it to confirm your most-linked pages are the ones you expect, not as a complete backlink audit.

How do AI Overviews show up in Search Console?

They are counted, but not separated. Google’s AI features documentation says sites appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode “are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console,” reported “within the ‘Web’ search type.” There is no AI Overview filter, so you cannot isolate those impressions or clicks.

That leaves inference. Signs worth watching, which are our heuristics rather than Google statements:

• Impressions rising while CTR falls on question-style queries, using the regex above.
• Average position steady or improving while clicks drop on informational pages.
• Declines concentrated on “what is” and “how to” pages, while commercial pages hold.

Google adds that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are “higher quality,” meaning users “are more likely to spend more time on the site.” That is Google’s claim; check it against your own engagement data. To connect Search Console with analytics and see AI referrals from other assistants, follow our guide to tracking AI traffic in GA4 and Search Console.

A monthly Google Search Console routine

Google suggests a monthly check, and that is enough if the check is structured. Ours runs in this order:

1. Performance, last 28 days vs previous 28: top 20 pages and queries by clicks; flag any drop over 20%.
2. Regex views: question queries and non-brand queries, CTR trend for each.
3. Page indexing: new “not indexed” reasons, and any important URL among them.
4. URL Inspection on the three pages that matter most: indexed, correct canonical, rendered content intact.
5. Sitemaps: status Success, discovered URL count roughly matching your page count.
6. Core Web Vitals and Manual actions: anything new in Poor, anything at all in Manual actions.

Search Console only shows Google. Run the same routine in Bing Webmaster Tools, which also reports AI citations separately. If you want this routine run for you, with the AI side included, that is part of our AI visibility audit.