Google's free service for a verified site owner: the queries it appeared for with impressions, clicks and average position, plus indexing, crawl and Core Web Vitals status.
Google Search Console (GSC) is Google's free service for a verified site owner. It reports the queries the site appeared for with impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position, alongside indexing, crawl and Core Web Vitals status. It is the only first-party record of how a site performs in Google Search.
Performance data runs 16 months. Queries below a privacy threshold are omitted, so clicks and impressions in the query report do not sum to the site totals. Position is an average across impressions rather than a rank. The interface returns 1,000 rows per report and the Search Analytics API returns up to 25,000 per request. AI Overviews impressions are folded into web totals rather than split out, so the report cannot separate a blue-link impression from an appearance inside a generated answer.
URL Inspection reports, for one URL, whether it is indexed, which canonical Google selected, when it was last crawled, and how the rendered page looked to Googlebot. The Pages report groups exclusions by reason, which is where technical SEO faults surface as counts rather than as anecdotes. Crawl stats show request volume and response codes by Googlebot type.
