Google Search Console

What it shows that analytics can't

Analytics starts counting when someone lands on your site. Search Console counts everything that happened in the results page first — how many times you appeared, at what position, for which query, and whether anyone clicked.

That pre-click layer is the whole point. When rankings move, Search Console tells you six weeks before revenue does. And since Google stopped passing query data to analytics tools well over a decade ago, this is the only place you see actual search terms rather than guesses.

• Queries — the real ones, aggregated. Nothing else gives you this.
• Impressions and average position — the leading indicators that move first.
• Index coverage — which of your pages Google has actually kept, and why it dropped the rest.
• Manual actions and security issues — a human penalty notice arrives here and nowhere else.
• Links — a partial view of who links to you, straight from Google rather than a third-party crawler.

Getting verified, and which property type to pick

Two property types exist and the choice matters more than people expect. A URL-prefix property covers exactly one protocol and one hostname — https://www.example.com and https://example.com are two separate properties with two separate datasets. A domain property covers every subdomain and both protocols at once.

Pick the domain property. It's a single TXT record at your DNS provider, and it stops the classic mistake of staring at a dataset covering a third of your traffic.

• DNS TXT record — the only method that gets you a domain property. Ten minutes with whoever holds the domain.
• HTML file upload — a file at your root. Fine, but it breaks if a migration doesn't carry it across.
• HTML meta tag — one line in the head. Same fragility.
• Google Analytics or Tag Manager — quickest if you already have edit access to either.

Five reports, ranked by how often they change a decision

The interface has far more than five screens. Most of them you'll open twice a year. These are the ones that actually alter what you do next.

1. Performance. Filter to the last 28 days, compare to the previous 28, and sort by impression change. Rising impressions with flat clicks means you're ranking on page two — the highest-return work on most sites. Use the query filter to split branded from non-branded; see impressions for how to read the number properly.
2. Page indexing. The list of pages Google decided not to keep, with reasons. Crawled — currently not indexed on a big share of your content is a quality signal, not a bug. Discovered — currently not indexed usually means crawl priority or thin pages.
3. Sitemaps. Submit it, then read the submitted-versus-indexed ratio. A 400-URL sitemap with 90 indexed pages is telling you something urgent about indexing.
4. Core Web Vitals. Built on real Chrome user data, so it needs enough traffic to populate and it lags a rolling 28-day window. Slow to react, which is exactly why it's trustworthy.
5. Manual Actions. Rarely populated, catastrophic when it is. This is where a human reviewer at Google tells you your links were bought. Check it monthly and after any ranking cliff.

The 16-month window, and the other limits

Search Console keeps 16 months of Performance data and then deletes the oldest day, every day. There is no archive and no paid tier that extends it. Any question about what happened two years ago is unanswerable unless you exported.

So export on day one. The cheapest route is the free BigQuery bulk data export, which writes daily rows you keep forever. Looker Studio connected to the API is the second option. Doing neither is a decision to lose your own history.

• Anonymised queries — rare search terms are stripped from the query table for privacy. Your query rows will never sum to your total clicks. This is normal, not a bug.
• Row limits — the interface exports 1,000 rows. The API and Looker Studio go far beyond that.
• Two to three days of lag — today's data isn't there yet. Don't panic on a Monday morning.
• Average position is an average of averages — useful as a trend line, misleading as a number. Average position covers why.
• Clicks from AI Overviews are folded into the same totals and not broken out, so you can't isolate them here.