Watch: Google Search Console
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.
Transcript
Google Search Console is a free service that gives you a direct look at how your website performs in Google Search. It is the only official, first-party record of your search data, tracking everything from impressions and clicks to your average search position.
The performance data goes back sixteen months. Keep in mind that Google hides some queries to protect user privacy, so your individual query numbers won't always add up to your site's total clicks and impressions. Also, the position metric is an average across all impressions, not a fixed rank. If you are exporting this data, the online dashboard shows up to one thousand rows, while the Search Analytics API can pull up to twenty-five thousand.
There is also a new beta report for generative artificial intelligence features. This tracks impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, though it does not show clicks or search positions yet, and its history is shorter than the standard sixteen months.
Beyond search traffic, the console is a powerful diagnostic tool. The URL Inspection tool lets you see exactly how Googlebot views a specific page, when it was last crawled, and which version Google chose as the master copy. Meanwhile, the Pages report groups indexing issues by their root cause, making it much easier to spot and fix technical search engine optimization faults across your site.