How to set up Google Search Console, and the first five reports to read

Google Search Console is where Google itself tells you how your site appears in its search results: which queries show your pages, how often people click, which URLs are indexed, and what is keeping the rest out. It is free, setup takes about ten minutes, and the data isn’t available anywhere else in the same form. Here is how to set it up, and the five reports to open first.

What Search Console is for

Analytics tools tell you what visitors do once they arrive. Search Console covers the step before that: the results page. It reports impressions (how often a page from your site appeared in results), clicks, click-through rate and average position, broken down by query, page, country, device and date. It also shows how Google crawls and indexes the site, and flags the problems it runs into along the way.

The performance data goes back 16 months, which makes it the best record you have of how search traffic changes through the year. The numbers are Google’s alone: Bing has its own webmaster tools, and its traffic won’t show up here.

Domain or URL-prefix property

When you add a site, Search Console first asks for a property type. This is the decision that matters most, because it sets which URLs the property includes.

Domain property

A Domain property covers every URL on the domain: all subdomains (www, blog, shop and so on) and both http and https. You enter only the domain name, such as example.com, with no protocol or path. It can only be verified through DNS, which is why some people skip it. If you can edit your DNS records, it is the most complete view and the one to start with.

URL-prefix property

A URL-prefix property covers only URLs that begin with the exact prefix you enter, protocol included. A property for https://www.example.com/ doesn’t include http://www.example.com/, https://example.com/ or any other subdomain. In exchange it offers more ways to verify: uploading an HTML file, adding a meta tag, using an existing Google Analytics or Tag Manager snippet, or a DNS record.

URL-prefix properties are useful when you can’t edit DNS, and when you want a separate view of one section, such as https://example.com/blog/. You can have both: a Domain property for the whole site plus a URL-prefix property for an important section is a common pairing.

Verify ownership with a DNS TXT record

To verify a Domain property, Search Console gives you a TXT record to add to your domain’s DNS. It has this shape (the token is unique to you):

Type    TXT
Name    @        (the root domain; some providers want this blank)
Value   google-site-verification=<your token>

1. In Search Console, open the property selector, choose Add property, pick Domain, enter your domain and continue. Copy the TXT value it shows.
2. Find out where your DNS is hosted. Often that’s your registrar, but if your nameservers point somewhere else (a CDN or a DNS service), the records live there instead.
3. Add a new TXT record for the root of the domain with the value you copied. Don’t edit or replace existing TXT records, such as the SPF record your email relies on: a domain can have several TXT records side by side.
4. Go back to Search Console and click Verify. If it fails, wait and try again. DNS changes can take anywhere from a few minutes to a day or more to become visible, depending on your provider and the record’s TTL.

Once you’re verified, invite colleagues from Settings › Users and permissions rather than sharing a Google login.

Submit your sitemap

A sitemap lists the URLs you want search engines to know about, usually at /sitemap.xml. Most CMSs and frameworks generate one; open it in a browser to check it lists your real pages. Submitting it tells Google where it is and gives you a report on what Google read.

1. Open Sitemaps in the Indexing section of the left-hand menu.
2. Enter your sitemap’s address and click Submit.
3. Come back later and check the status. Success means Google could read it. Couldn’t fetch or Has errors means something went wrong, and the report says what.

Also list the sitemap in your robots.txt, so every crawler can find it, not just Google’s:

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

It helps to know what a sitemap doesn’t do:

• It doesn’t guarantee indexing. Google still decides what to crawl and index; the sitemap is a strong hint.
• It should list only the canonical URLs you want in search. Leave out redirects, pages marked noindex and duplicates.
• One file holds at most 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed. Larger sites use several sitemaps and a sitemap index file.

The first five reports to read

These five reports tell you the most about a site you’ve just added. Some take a few days to fill in after verification.

1. Performance › Search results

The core report. Turn on all four metrics at the top of the chart, then switch between the Queries and Pages tabs below it. Set the date range to the last three months, and use Compare to set it against the previous period.

Read it in this order: the pages that bring the most clicks; the queries with many impressions but few clicks, which point at a weak title or snippet, or a ranking just out of view; and the pages that dropped against the previous period. Queries with an average position of roughly 8 to 20 deserve their own list. Our guide to page-two keywords covers what to do with them.

2. Indexing › Pages

How many of your URLs are indexed, and why the rest aren’t. The reasons listed under Why pages aren’t indexed are the useful part. Some are expected and harmless: Page with redirect, Alternate page with proper canonical tag, or Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag on pages you meant to keep out. Others deserve a closer look: Not found (404) for URLs that should exist, Blocked by robots.txt for pages you want in search, and Crawled – currently not indexed or Discovered – currently not indexed on important pages, which often points at thin or duplicate content or weak internal linking.

Click a reason to see example URLs, and fix problems by pattern (a template, a section), not one URL at a time.

3. URL Inspection

Paste any URL from your property into the search bar at the top of Search Console. You’ll see whether it’s indexed, when Google last crawled it, and the canonical URL Google chose, which isn’t always the one you declared. Test live URL fetches the page as it is now, and Request indexing asks Google to recrawl it. Requests are limited per day.

4. Experience › Core Web Vitals

Field data from real Chrome users (the Chrome UX Report), grouped into URLs with similar problems, separately for mobile and desktop. It covers Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability). A site with little traffic may see no data here; lab tests such as PageSpeed Insights still point the way.

5. Links

Your most-linked pages (from other sites and from your own), the sites that link to you most, and the most common link text. Start with the internal side: important pages that few of your own pages link to are easy to fix. The external side doesn’t list every link on the web, so treat it as a guide, not an inventory.

Make it a habit

Search Console is most useful on a schedule, not only when something has gone wrong. A weekly look at Performance against the previous period, plus a monthly pass through the Pages report, catches most problems early. Also link Search Console to your GA4 property (in GA4, under Admin › Product links), so search queries sit next to what visitors do on the site.

If you’d rather not do the routine by hand, Trafficmend connects to Search Console and GA4 with read-only access, crawls every page, and puts queries, indexing problems and traffic in one place, with fixes ranked by the clicks they’re expected to bring.