Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free Google service that shows how your site performs in Google Search. It reports the queries you appear for, how often your results are shown and clicked, and how Google crawls and indexes your pages. Unlike analytics tools that measure on-site behaviour, it focuses on the search side: the bridge between Google's results and your site.

The Performance report is its best-known feature, providing four core metrics: impressions (how often your results appeared), clicks (how often searchers clicked through), CTR (clicks divided by impressions), and average position (your mean ranking). You can break these down by query, page, country, device, and search appearance, which makes it the authoritative first-party source for what people actually search before reaching you.

Beyond performance, Search Console helps you manage technical health. The URL Inspection tool checks how Google sees a specific page and lets you request indexing. Coverage and indexing reports flag pages that are excluded or erroring, the sitemaps section lets you submit your sitemap, and the enhancement reports cover structured data and page experience. Together these tools help you diagnose why pages may not be appearing as expected.

Because the data comes directly from Google, Search Console figures are the closest you get to ground truth for organic search, though they carry their own quirks: data is delayed by a couple of days, very low-volume queries are filtered for privacy, and metrics are aggregated. Used alongside Google Analytics, which covers what happens after the click, it gives a complete view from search result to on-site outcome.

Related: Average Position, CTR, no organic traffic