Glossary · SEO & AI search
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is Google's free service that shows how a website performs in Google Search — the queries it appears for, its clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position — and reports on crawling, indexing and technical issues.
Also called: GSC, Search Console, Google Webmaster Tools
Updated
The four Search Console performance metrics
| Metric | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Clicks | Clicks from a Google results page to your site |
| Impressions | Times a URL from your site appeared in results a user loaded |
| CTR | Clicks ÷ impressions |
| Average position | Mean of the topmost position your site held for each impression |
Other key reports
- Pages (indexing) — which URLs are indexed, and why others aren't (noindex, duplicate without user-selected canonical, crawled but not indexed…).
- URL Inspection — the indexed version of one URL, its canonical and whether it can be indexed now.
- Sitemaps — submit and monitor sitemap.xml files.
- Core Web Vitals — field performance from real Chrome users.
- Links — top linking sites and internally linked pages.
Search Console example
A page shows 22,000 impressions, 330 clicks (1.5% CTR) and an average position of 9.4 for "cookieless analytics" over 28 days. Position 9 means it's at the bottom of page one; the CTR is in line with that. Improving the content to move into the top three is worth far more than a title tweak — while for a page at position 2 with 1.5% CTR, the title is the problem.
Search Console data limits
- Up to 16 months of performance history.
- Rare queries are anonymized and left out of query tables, so query rows sum to less than the page total.
- Data typically arrives with a delay of about two days.
- Clicks won't match analytics sessions exactly — see organic traffic.
- AI Overview appearances are folded into Web search results, not reported separately.
Search Console in VisitTrack
Connect your Search Console property (read-only Google authorization) and VisitTrack's Search Console tab shows your queries with clicks, impressions, CTR and average position, which page each query ranks for, and the trend over time — in the same dashboard as visitors, goals and revenue, so you can see which rankings produce customers. VisitTrack also tracks the AI crawlers that Search Console can't see, and counts visits from AI assistants as their own channel.
Frequently asked questions
Is Google Search Console free?
Yes. Search Console is free for any site owner who verifies ownership of a domain or URL prefix.
What is the difference between Google Search Console and Google Analytics?
Search Console reports what happens on Google's results pages: queries, impressions, clicks and positions. Analytics reports what visitors do on your site after they arrive. Together they connect search visibility to on-site outcomes.
Related terms
- ImpressionsImpressions are the number of times a piece of content — a search result, an ad, a post — was displayed to users, whether or not anyone clicked it.
- Click-through rate (CTR)Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who clicked a link out of everyone who saw it — clicks divided by impressions.
- Organic trafficOrganic traffic is visits that come from unpaid search engine results — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and others — as opposed to paid search ads, social, referral or direct traffic.
- Crawl budgetCrawl budget is the number of URLs on a site that a search engine crawler can and wants to crawl in a given period — determined, in Google's terms, by crawl capacity (how much your server can handle) and crawl demand (how much Google wants to recrawl your content).
- Canonical URLA canonical URL is the preferred version of a web page that search engines should index and rank when the same or very similar content is available at several URLs, usually declared with a rel="canonical" link element.
Tools and guides
See which channels actually bring paying customers
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