What is Search Console?

Search Console is a free service from Google for monitoring a site’s status in Google Search and for seeing and fixing its problems.

You do not need to sign up for Search Console to appear on Google; Google says so explicitly. But without it, how a site appears on Google can only be guessed from the outside. Search Console turns that guess into data: it shows which pages are in the index, which have been left out and why, how many times the site was shown and clicked in which searches, and whether its structured data is valid. If you would like to read the reports together, SEO consulting starts with these reports.

To add a site, you create a property. A Domain property gathers all of a domain’s subdomains and protocols in a single view and is verified only through a DNS record; a URL-prefix property covers only the addresses matching the prefix you enter and offers several verification methods. We explained every step in the Search Console guide.

Which Search Console reports are used most?

• Performance — impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position; we explained how to read average position in the guide to checking where you rank.
• Page indexing — pages in and out of the index, and the reason for each.
• URL Inspection — the status of a single address on Google, and the main address Google chose for it.
• Sitemaps — whether the submitted sitemaps were read.
• Enhancements — the validity of the structured data on the pages.

Ownership of the account is a decision too. In Search Console, an owner can add and remove other people; users can only view. Keeping verified ownership in the company’s own permanent account ensures that access is not lost when the company parts ways with the person who built the site.

There are also things Search Console does not show: what a visitor does after entering the site, the situation on other search engines, and competitors’ data. The tool shows a problem; it does not solve it.

First-hand example: this site’s Search Console reports were the first place to flag two structured data defects. The Profile page report flagged the fact that only a date was printed in the page’s dateModified field as an “invalid date-time”; the fix was a full date-time with a time zone (23.09.2026). The Breadcrumbs report showed an item with an empty name; since that day this site’s generator stops the build when a breadcrumb trail contains an unnamed item. We gathered which report points to what when a site does not appear on Google at all in the guide to not showing up on Google.

If you want to find out together why your site doesn’t show up on Google, SEO consulting audits every layer from crawling to indexing and makes the fix in the source code.