Google Search Console

~20 min · SEO

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Primary Source

Google Search Central — Search Console Help

Official documentation for Search Console. Start with URL Inspection Tool and Performance report. Read →

What is Search Console?

Google Search Console (GSC) is Google's free tool showing your site's presence in search: which queries bring users, which pages are indexed, crawl errors, Core Web Vitals data from real users, and structured data validation. It's the feedback loop between your site and Google.

Setup

search.google.com/search-console → Add Property → Verify ownership via:

DNS TXT record (recommended) — add at Cloudflare/Route53
HTML file — serve Google's file at your root
Meta tag — add to HTML head

<!-- Meta tag method -->
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="abc123tokenhere" />

Submit Sitemap & Key Reports

# GSC → Sitemaps → Add sitemap.xml
# GSC shows: URLs submitted vs indexed, errors blocking indexing

Report	What it shows	Action
Performance	Clicks, impressions, CTR, position per query	Find high impressions / low CTR → improve title/description
Coverage	Indexed, excluded, error pages	Fix "Crawled - currently not indexed" pages
Core Web Vitals	LCP/INP/CLS for real users	Fix "Poor" pages first
URL Inspection	How Google sees any specific URL	Debug indexing issues per page

URL Inspection — Your Debugging Tool

# URL Inspection → paste any URL → Test Live URL
# Check:
# - Is it indexed?
# - Is Google rendering it correctly? (screenshot provided)
# - Any structured data errors?
# - Coverage status

# After fixing an issue: Request Indexing (takes minutes to hours)

💡 New site?

After launch: (1) Submit sitemap, (2) Request Indexing for key pages via URL Inspection. Speeds up discovery from weeks to days.

Check Your Understanding

1. GSC shows your homepage as "Discovered - currently not indexed." What does this mean?

2. Your page has 800 impressions/month but 0.5% CTR. Best action?

3. You fixed a structured data error and want Google to re-check the page quickly. How?