Google Search Console: what it does, and how to read it without fooling yourself

What it does, and what it does not

Search Console tells you what Google crawled, what it indexed, what it refused to index and what people typed before they clicked. It does not tell you what visitors did once they arrived: that is GA4, and the two disagree on purpose.

It also does not rank your site, and nothing you press in it makes Google index a page. The URL Inspection tool lets you request indexing, and Google is explicit that requesting does not guarantee it.

The property: pick Domain, not URL prefix

When you add a site, Google offers two property types. A Domain property covers every subdomain and both protocols at once; a URL-prefix property covers exactly one, so https and http, www and bare, are four different properties.

I set up the first site as a URL prefix and spent a week looking at a report that was missing the half of the traffic arriving on the other hostname. A Domain property needs a DNS record, which takes five minutes and saves that week.

Page Indexing: the report to open first

Before Performance, before anything: the Page Indexing report tells you how many of your pages Google decided to keep. A page that is not indexed cannot rank, and no amount of content work changes that.

Two statuses are worth learning by heart. «Discovered - currently not indexed» means Google knows the URL exists and has not fetched it; «Crawled - currently not indexed» means it fetched it, read it and chose not to keep it.

The first is usually a crawl-budget or a linking problem. The second is a content problem, and it is the harder one. The full list is in the seven causes of a page not appearing in Google.

Performance: why the rows never add up

The Performance report shows impressions, clicks, CTR and average position. The first thing to know about it is that the totals do not equal the sum of the rows, and that is by design, not a bug.

Two reasons. Google anonymises queries that very few people type, so they exist in the total and in no row. And a single visit can match several queries, so adding rows double-counts.

Average position is the other trap. Google defines it as an average of the topmost position your site reached on each impression, so a page seen once at position 3 and never again beats a page seen four hundred times at position 11. Read it next to impressions or do not read it at all.

curl -s -A "Googlebot" https://your-site.com/page | wc -w
→ how many words the crawler actually receives, right now
Search Console tells you what Google did last time it looked.
This tells you what it would get if it looked today.

Sitemaps: submit it, and do not trust the first status

Submitting a sitemap tells Google which URLs you consider canonical. It is a hint, not an instruction: Google indexes URLs that are not in it and ignores URLs that are.

The status right after submitting says «Couldn't fetch» far more often than anything is actually wrong. Wait a day before believing it, and meanwhile open the sitemap URL in a browser: if it renders, the file is fine and the panel is behind.

If you want to check it yourself

Three things you can verify in five minutes, without waiting for any report to refresh:

• Open Page Indexing and write down the number of indexed pages. Compare it with the number of URLs in your sitemap. A large gap is your first real finding.

• Pick your most important page, run it through URL Inspection and read «Crawled as». If it says a smartphone user agent and the rendered HTML has no body text, your problem is rendering, not content.

• Filter Performance by that page and sort by impressions, never by position.

Watch it explained, by the people who built it

Three short videos from Google's own channels. They are the same source the links above point to, in video form:

• Intro to Google Search Console · Google Search Central, 3 minutes. Episode 1 of the official training series.

• 7 ways to verify site ownership · Google Search Central, 14 minutes. Every verification method, including the DNS one that a Domain property needs.

• Performance reports in Search Console · Google Search Central, 8 minutes. The report whose rows do not add up, explained by the person who owns it.