How to Use Google Search Console for SEO

Short answer: Search Console is the only place Google tells you which searches showed your pages, how often, and whether anyone clicked. It's free, it covers 16 months of history, and since June 2026 it also reports how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. Longer answer: most of the tool is noise for a small business. Six reports do the work.

We rewrote this guide in September 2026. The 2022 version described reports that no longer exist under those names and one that never did. Here is what Search Console actually shows today, where each report lives, and what it still can't tell you.

What Search Console is, and what it isn't

Search Console is Google's own report on your site's presence in Google Search. It's first-party data: the queries, impressions, clicks, and positions come straight from Google, not from a third-party crawler sampling results. That's its whole advantage over rank trackers.

Three things it is not. It isn't a keyword research tool; it only shows queries you already appear for. It isn't real-time; the newest day or two is preliminary and drawn as a dotted line. And it isn't a competitor tool; you see your own property and nothing else.

Setup takes five minutes

Choose a Domain property (actuatemedia.com) over a URL-prefix property (https://www.actuatemedia.com/) when you can. The Domain property collects every subdomain and protocol in one place, so a stray http:// or non-www URL doesn't end up in a separate report. Verification is a DNS TXT record. Then submit your XML sitemap under Indexing → Sitemaps and give Google a few days to start filling the reports.

The six reports that matter

1. Performance → Search results

This is the report people mean when they say "Search Console." Four metrics: clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position. Six ways to slice them: queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance, and dates. The default view is the last three months; the maximum is 16 months, and Google keeps nothing older than that unless you turn on the BigQuery bulk export.

Three habits that make this report useful rather than decorative:

• Filter by page first, then read queries. Click a page in the Pages tab, switch to the Queries tab, and you see exactly what that one page ranks for. That's the list to write the next revision against.
• Use the regex filter. In any Query or Page filter, change the match type to Custom (regex). Google uses RE2 syntax and it's case-sensitive, so (?i)^(how|what|why|which)\b pulls every question-style query regardless of capitalization. A "does not match regex" filter on your brand name strips branded searches and shows how the site does with strangers.
• Compare date ranges. The date filter has a Compare tab. Last 28 days against the previous 28 answers "did that change help?" better than any dashboard.

One caution on average position. It's the average of your topmost result across every impression, so a page that ranks 3rd for one query and 40th for another shows as roughly 21. Read position alongside impressions and CTR, never alone.

2. Performance → Generative AI

Google launched this report on June 3, 2026 and rolled it out to every property worldwide on August 31. It's easy to miss: in the left sidebar it sits under Performance → Search results as an expandable item labeled Generative AI, and if you don't see it, appending /ai to the Search results report URL opens it directly. It won't appear at all until the property clears an impression threshold in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

The report shows impressions only, grouped by date, page, country, and device. No clicks, no queries. For our own property it currently shows 10,967 impressions across 174 pages over the last three months, 2,607 of them for one SEO service page, and nothing about whether anyone clicked or what they typed. It answers "am I showing up?" and stops. Our post on how much traffic AI search actually sends covers what to do with that number.

One thing we learned from it firsthand: it credits Google's chosen canonical, not the URL you'd expect. After we moved our blog under /blog/ this summer, the report kept attributing impressions to the old addresses for weeks. One post showed 502 impressions on its old URL and 7 on the new one. The redirects were fine. Google's index hadn't caught up.

3. URL Inspection

Paste any URL from your property into the search bar at the top of Search Console. The result tells you whether the page is indexed, when Google last crawled it, whether it was crawled as mobile or desktop, and, the field worth reading most carefully, the Google-selected canonical next to your own declared canonical. When those two disagree, the page you think is ranking isn't the one Google is showing.

Two buttons matter. Test live URL fetches the page now and shows what Googlebot sees, including a rendered screenshot, which is how you confirm a fix before Google recrawls. Request indexing asks Google to recrawl sooner; it's the right move after a meaningful edit and a waste of a daily quota for anything else. The live test does not check duplicate or canonical status, so a green live result isn't proof the page will rank as itself.

4. Indexing → Pages

This is the report the 2022 guide called "Index Coverage." Google renamed it in 2022. It splits every URL Google knows about into indexed and not indexed, and lists the reasons for the second group. Google's own guidance is blunt: if your site has fewer than 500 pages, you probably don't need this report, and a site: search for your key pages will tell you what you need to know.

For larger sites, three reasons deserve attention and the rest usually don't:

• Crawled – currently not indexed. Google saw the page and chose not to index it. On a marketing site this is almost always a quality or duplication signal, not a technical one. Our duplicate-content post covers the common causes.
• Discovered – currently not indexed. Google knows the URL exists and hasn't gotten to it. On a small site that's a crawl-budget or internal-linking problem; on a new site it's usually just time.
• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user. You said page A is canonical; Google picked page B. Inspect both and decide which one you actually want ranking.

Ignore the 404 rows unless they're pages you meant to keep. Google only shows 404s from the past month, and a 404 for a page that's genuinely gone is correct behavior.

5. Experience → Core Web Vitals

This report grades your pages on three field metrics from real Chrome users over the trailing 28 days: Largest Contentful Paint (good is 2.5 seconds or under), Interaction to Next Paint (200 milliseconds or under), and Cumulative Layout Shift (0.1 or under). Each is measured at the 75th percentile, so "good" means three out of four visits hit the mark. Pages are grouped by similar templates, and a group's status is its worst metric.

Honest limitation: small sites often see "No data available." The report needs a minimum volume of Chrome traffic per URL group before it reports anything, and a site doing a few hundred visits a month may never clear it. In that case run PageSpeed Insights on your top five pages instead. Our Core Web Vitals post explains what each metric means for conversion.

6. Links

Two halves. External links shows which sites link to you most, which of your pages get the most links, and the anchor text they use. Internal links shows which of your own pages you link to most, which is the fastest check on whether your service pages are getting the internal link equity your blog posts should be sending them.

What it doesn't do: it's a sample, not a complete list; tables cap at 1,000 rows; it doesn't flag nofollow; and it includes links Google found that may have since been removed. It also can't show you anyone else's backlinks. For competitive link research you need a third-party index. For confirming that a placement you earned actually got picked up, this report is enough.

Three checks we run monthly

1. Top 20 pages by clicks, compared to the previous 28 days. Anything down more than 20% gets a URL Inspection to rule out an indexing or canonical change before anyone touches the content.
2. Queries with high impressions and a CTR under 2%. Those pages are ranking; the title and description aren't earning the click. That's a one-hour fix, and it's the highest-return work in the tool.
3. Generative AI impressions by page, alongside branded query impressions. If both climb together, AI surfaces are sending people who search your name later. It's not proof, but it's the best signal Search Console offers right now.

What Search Console can't tell you

Keyword volume for terms you don't rank for yet. Anything about a competitor. Clicks or queries from AI features. Conversions, revenue, or what visitors did after they landed. For the first two you need a third-party SEO tool; for the last, connect Search Console to GA4 under Admin → Product links and read the two side by side.

Let's be candid about the tool's place in the work. Search Console tells you where you stand. It does not move you. The ranking work is still content that answers the query, a site that loads, and a business other sites are willing to name. If you'd like us to read your property and tell you what we'd do first, start with a free SEO audit. Our SEO agency and GEO services run on the same reports described here, and every client sees them in a live dashboard.

Sources

• Google Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553
• Google Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search). Worldwide rollout noted August 31, 2026. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139
• Google Search Console Help. URL Inspection Tool. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289
• Google Search Console Help. Page indexing report. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203
• Google Search Console Help. Core Web Vitals report. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520
• Google Search Console Help. Links report. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9049606
• Google Search Console, generative AI performance report for actuatemedia.com. Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, June 6–September 5, 2026.

Written by Brad Holly, MBA, Partner — 25+ years in performance-based digital advertising. Originally published February 16, 2022; rewritten September 2026. Next review: March 2027.