Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is Google’s free platform for monitoring and maintaining a site’s presence in Google Search. It reports the queries you appear for, your impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and average ranking position; which pages are indexed and why; and technical signals like Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, and crawl health.

Because the data comes straight from Google, GSC is the most authoritative first-party source of search performance data available — no third-party rank tracker matches it for accuracy or coverage.

Key reports

• Performance — impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position, sliced by query, page, device, country, and search type.
• Page indexing (Coverage) — which URLs are indexed, and the reason any are excluded.
• Page Experience and Core Web Vitals — field data on loading, interactivity, and layout stability.
• Links — the internal and external links pointing to your pages.
• URL Inspection — how Google crawled, rendered, and indexed a single URL, including the canonical it selected.
• Crawl Stats — how Googlebot requests your site over time, and host availability.

The GSC glossary

Search Console uses a lot of specialized vocabulary. This glossary defines each term in plain language — filter to the Analytics and Technical categories on the glossary to see the full set, from domain properties to Discover performance.

Example

You notice organic clicks dropping on product pages. In GSC you open Performance, filter to those URLs, and confirm the decline; then Page Indexing shows a batch newly marked “Crawled — currently not indexed,” and URL Inspection reveals Google selected a different canonical after a recent template change. That chain — Performance to Indexing to URL Inspection — is the everyday diagnostic loop GSC is built for.