Google Search Console: what it shows and how to use it

Google Search Console is a free Google tool that shows how a website performs in Google Search: the queries it appears for, the clicks it gets, and the pages Google has or has not indexed. It is the only place where Google itself reports on your site, so any conversation about your Google rankings should start with its data.

How it works

You add your website as a "property" and prove you control it. Google then collects data for that property and shows it in a set of reports.

There are two property types:

Property type	How you verify	What it covers
Domain property	A TXT record in your domain's DNS settings	Every version of the domain: http and https, www and non-www, all subdomains
URL-prefix property	HTML file, meta tag, Google Analytics or Tag Manager	Only URLs that start with that exact address

For a business site, pick the domain property. If the site later moves from www to non-www, or you add a booking subdomain, you keep one continuous set of data.

Search Console has no ranking switch. You read what Google sees, and you can send a few signals back: a sitemap, a request to recrawl a page, a removal request.

The reports a business owner uses

Five reports answer nearly every practical question:

Performance. Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, by query, page, country, device and date. Filter the country to United Arab Emirates if you serve local customers, because global impressions can hide what happens in Dubai.
URL Inspection. Paste any URL and see whether it is indexed, which canonical Google chose, when Google last crawled it, and whether a live test passes. The "Request indexing" button sits here.
Pages (Page indexing). How many known URLs are indexed and why the others are not: "Crawled, currently not indexed", "Discovered, currently not indexed", "Excluded by 'noindex' tag", "Not found (404)", duplicate and canonical issues.
Sitemaps. Where you submit sitemap.xml and see whether Google could read it.
Core Web Vitals. Field data from real Chrome users, grouped into good, needs improvement and poor against Google's thresholds (LCP 2.5 s, INP 200 ms, CLS 0.1). Low-traffic sites often see "not enough data". The metrics are explained in Core Web Vitals.

Two more reports matter rarely but urgently: Manual actions (a reviewer at Google penalised the site) and Security issues (hacked content or malware). If either shows anything, fix it before any other SEO work.

Hypothetical example

Hypothetical example: a physiotherapy clinic in Jumeirah launches a bilingual site with 40 pages. After two months the owner opens Search Console:

Performance, filtered to UAE: 3,200 impressions, 61 clicks, average position 18.
The top query by impressions is "physiotherapy jumeirah", position 11, almost no clicks.
Pages report: 22 of 40 URLs indexed; 14 marked "Duplicate without user-selected canonical".

The owner inspects a few of the 14 URLs. They are the same service pages reachable with and without a trailing slash and with a ?lang= parameter, and none of them declares a canonical. The developer adds a self-referencing canonical to every page, redirects the variants and resubmits the sitemap.

For the query at position 11, which usually means the top of page two, the cheapest first fix is a clearer title and description on the service page. The owner reads every finding straight from the free reports, without a paid SEO tool.

Where it applies

Any site that should get traffic from Google. This covers clinics, law firms, rental companies and restaurants with their own website.
Large content sites. Lucent Legal has 448 URLs in its sitemap and 426 guide pages in two languages. On a site that size, the Pages report shows which guides Google picked up and which it skipped.
Launches and migrations. After a redesign or domain change, URL Inspection and the Pages report show whether old URLs redirect and new ones get indexed.
Multilingual sites in the UAE. Search Console no longer has a separate international targeting report, so you check language alternates page by page in URL Inspection. Common errors are in hreflang mistakes on RU/EN/AR sites.

Search Console needs a site Google can reach. The Lucent Rental site has sitemap.xml, robots.txt and llms.txt in place. The client has not connected it to a public domain yet, so there is nothing to verify. Connect the domain first, then set up Search Console.

How it differs from neighbouring tools

Tool	What it answers	What it cannot answer
Google Search Console	How Google sees and shows your site before the click	What visitors do after they land
Google Analytics 4	What visitors do on the site: sessions, pages, events, conversions	Which search queries they typed
Google Business Profile	How your listing performs in Maps and the local pack	Anything about your website's pages
Bing Webmaster Tools	The same questions as Search Console, for Bing	Google data

Clicks in Search Console and sessions in Analytics will not match. Search Console counts a click on a Google result. Analytics counts a session only if its tag loaded and the visitor passed consent. To connect clicks to enquiries, add UTM parameters where you control the link, and read tracking SEO leads from WhatsApp.

Search Console covers Google Search only. Whether ChatGPT or other AI assistants mention you is a separate question, covered under GEO.

What not to do

Letting the contractor own the property. If your agency verifies the site under its own account and you part ways, you lose the history or depend on them to hand it over. Verify under your account and add them as a user.
Reading average position without a filter. An average across all queries and countries tells you little. Filter by query or page, and by UAE if you serve local clients.
Clicking "Request indexing" every day. It will not push a page Google has decided not to index. Fix the reason shown in the Pages report.
Treating every "not indexed" URL as a problem. Redirects, filter pages, thank-you pages and noindex pages should stay out of the index. Act when service pages or articles appear in the list.
Submitting a sitemap full of redirects and 404s. List only canonical, live, indexable URLs.
Forgetting the 16-month limit. Older data disappears. Export the Performance report once a quarter if you want year-on-year comparisons.

How to check it is set up right

Ask your developer or SEO contractor these questions, or check them yourself:

Is the property a domain property, verified by DNS?
Is the business's own Google account a verified Owner under Settings, Users and permissions?
Is the sitemap submitted with status "Success", and is the discovered URL count close to the real number of pages?
Does URL Inspection on the homepage and main service page show "URL is on Google" with the canonical you expect?
Are Manual actions and Security issues both empty?

On a new build, make Search Console part of the handover. The Moon Mars build ships a sitemap and llms.txt as part of the site. You can see what goes into a build on the websites service page.

Monthly checklist

In Performance, compare the last 28 days with the previous 28 days, with the country set to United Arab Emirates. Note clicks and impressions.
Sort queries by impressions. For queries at positions 8 to 20 with few clicks, rewrite the title and description of the page that ranks for them.
In Pages, check whether any service page or new article is marked "not indexed", and read the reason.
In Sitemaps, confirm the last read date is recent and there are no errors.
In Core Web Vitals, if mobile shows poor URLs, send the example URLs to your developer.
Run URL Inspection on every page you published this month.

Core Web Vitals: speed and stability metrics in the report of the same name.
UTM parameters: tags that connect a visit to its source after the click.
hreflang: tells Google which language version to show. You check it page by page in URL Inspection.
GEO: visibility in AI assistants, which Search Console does not measure.
Tracking SEO leads from WhatsApp: how to get from Search Console clicks to counted enquiries.

Questions and answers

Is Google Search Console free?

Yes. Any site owner with a Google account can verify a site and use every report at no cost. There is no paid tier.

Who should own the Search Console property, me or my web developer?

You should. Verify the property under the business's own Google account and add your developer or SEO contractor as a user with Full permission. If they leave, you remove the user and keep the data.

Does Search Console show how many leads my site brought?

No. It stops at the click from Google to your page. Leads from forms or WhatsApp need analytics, UTM tags or a CRM on top of it.

How long does Search Console keep data?

The Performance report keeps 16 months of history. To compare longer periods, export the data or connect it to a reporting tool before it ages out.