Whether you’re just starting out with SEO or have advanced knowledge of various aspects of the field, Search Console provides a wide variety of reports that can assist you in monitoring and improving the performance of your website in relation to Google Search. Check out the beginner’s guide to SEO for Search Console as well if you’re just getting started with learning about Search Console.
The primary focus of your work will determine which report is the most pertinent. On a more general level, it is possible to differentiate between reports that would be most relevant to web developers and those that would be most relevant to SEO specialists, digital marketers, and site administrators. Even though the groups share several points of intersection, it is still beneficial to make an effort to present the reports that are most pertinent to each of the groups.
Useful reports for search engine optimization (SEO) professionals, digital marketers, and website administrators
The following is a list that contains the most helpful reports that can be accessed through the Search Console. These reports will assist you in managing various aspects of how Google Search indexes, crawls, and serves your website.
- Determine whether or not your website is subject to any Google Search manual actions that have been taken against it. In the event that a site is subject to manual action, Google may choose not to display some or all of that site within the search engine’s results. The report on Manual Actions details any problems that have been found, where on your website they are located, and where additional information can be found.
- Hide pages from Google Search temporarily while you edit them. Using the Removals tool, you can quickly remove content from your website that appears in the search results on Google. In the event that your request is granted, the restriction will be lifted after approximately six months. During this time, you will have the opportunity to find a solution that will either permit the content to be viewed or remove it permanently.
- Inform Google that your site will be relocating. If you move your website from one domain or subdomain to another, the Change of Address tool notifies Google about the change and assists in migrating your Google Search results from your old site to your new site. If you do this, your website will continue to display in Google’s search results.
- Examine the problems that have arisen with the implementation of your structured data. The Rich result status reports outline which of your website’s rich results Google was able to read and which it was unable to. You will discover information regarding errors that prevent showing your pages as rich results, warnings that might limit your appearance, as well as information regarding how to debug and fix issues.
Reports that are useful for website developers
The developer community can benefit from the following reports by creating websites that are robust, easily findable, and optimised for Google Search.
- Understand site-wide Search indexing issues. The Index Coverage report details the pages that have been omitted from search, as well as those that contain errors or warnings. In addition, it displays the total number of impressions that the website pages have accumulated on Google Search, which assists in gaining an understanding of the potential impact that issues may have had on the organic traffic that you receive.
- Debug indexing problems at the page level in Search. The URL Inspection tool allows users to view the current index status of website pages, as well as options to test a live URL, ask Google to crawl a specific page, and view detailed information about the page’s loaded resources and other information. In addition, the tool allows users to view detailed information about the page’s loaded resources and other information.
- Locate and address any security issues that are affecting your website. Warnings are displayed in the Security Issues report whenever Google discovers that a website may have been hacked or used in a manner that could potentially cause harm to a visitor or the device they are using.
- Ensure that visitors to your website have a positive experience whenever they visit a page there. The Core Web Vitals report illustrates how well pages perform based on data collected from actual users, which is also referred to as field data.
Google Search Console Reports & Tools at a Glance
| Report or tool | Description | |
| Overview page | Displays a summary of the health of your property, which may include any manual actions or security issues that have been applied to your website, graphs of total clicks and error/valid indexed pages, and summaries of error/valid enhancements for your website (mobile-friendly URLs, AMP pages, structured data found on your site). Suggested use: if you’re only checking in every so often, make sure to look for any manual actions or security problems. Check for sudden increases in the number of coverage or enhancement errors, and if you find any of these, open the report to begin troubleshooting. Keep an eye out for sudden drops in your click count, and when you find one, open the report to see what caused it. Beneficial to: Each and Every One | |
| Performance reports: > Web Search > Discover‡ > News‡ ‡ Available only if your property has sufficient traffic on this platform | Investigate the number of people who saw and clicked on your site in Google Search, the queries that brought up your site in Search, and the average position you hold in the search results. You will be able to view the appropriate report if your website possesses Discover data or News data. The data includes things like clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and position for your website, as well as the query strings that users were looking for. Data can be categorised based on the URL of the page, the country where the query originated, or the type of device. Suggested use: conduct regular reviews to look for sudden increases or decreases in the number of clicks or impressions. Investigate the search terms that bring up your website, and check to see if the queries you were anticipating also brought up your site. Learn more about why visitors are leaving your website. Beneficial to: SEOs and site owners can benefit from this resource. | |
| URL Inspection tool | Check out the information that the Google index has about a particular URL on your site, or perform an experiment on a live page. This information is quite comprehensive and includes page HTML code and errors, AMP/mobile usability errors and code, JavaScript output and errors encountered when rendering the page, any canonicals selected for a page, as well as additional information. To make use of the tool, simply type a URL into the bar that is located at the very top of Search Console. Suggested use: Utilization of this report is suggested for the purpose of diagnosing and correcting any crawling errors that may have occurred on your website. You can gain access to this tool by going to the Coverage report and clicking on a particular URL there. You can also use this report to fix problems on a page and then retest the page before resubmitting it for indexing again. Useful for: SEOs, developers | |
| Coverage report | Displays the current index status of every page on your website. Pages are organised into categories according to whether or not they have been indexed, along with an explanation of why they have been or have not been indexed. Suggested use: It is recommended that you perform periodic scans to identify crawling issues on your site by looking for spikes in errors or drops in the number of indexed pages. Useful for: SEOs, developers/site administrators | |
| Sitemaps Report | Shows which sitemaps have been submitted for your site, sitemap statistics, and any errors Google encountered when processing your sitemaps. Suggested use: Suggested use: Periodically check to see if Google could process your sitemaps, or use for debugging if Google can’t seem to find new pages on your site. Useful for: SEOs | |
| Core Web Vitals Report | Displays how well your page works in actual, everyday situations. Suggested use: It is suggested that you thoroughly check how well your pages perform for your users and that you fix any pages that perform poorly. Useful for: SEOs, Developers | |
| Mobile Usability Report | Examine the mobile usability of each and every page that has been indexed on your website. Suggested use: It is recommended that you carry out regular audits to identify any problems with the site’s usability on mobile devices. Useful for: SEOs and developers will find this useful. | |
| AMP Report | Check to see which of the AMP pages on your site can be indexed and which cannot. Suggested use: It is recommended that you perform routine checks to identify any problems that are affecting all AMP pages on your website, as well as to identify any unexpected spikes or drops in the number of indexed AMP pages. Useful for: SEOs and developers will find this useful. | |
| Rich Result Status Reports | Find out which rich results Google was able to crawl and which it couldn’t. This report only supports a subset of the rich results that are available; refer to the documentation for more information on which types are supported. Only if Google has found items of a particular type on your site will a particular report type be displayed in the report. Suggested use: It is recommended that you scan for errors at regular intervals and debug any problems that you find. It is also possible to use this tool to determine the number of rich results of a specific type that Google is able to process. Useful for: SEOs and developers will find this useful. | |
| Manual Actions report | Displays any manual actions that have been taken against your site. Suggested use: It is recommended that if you see a manual action in your overview page, you should open the report to learn more details about the report, how to fix the issue, and how to submit a reconsideration request after you have fixed the issue. Useful for: Each and Every One | |
| Security Issues report | Displays any potential security flaws that Google has found on your website. Suggested use: If you notice a security issue on your overview page or if your site is displaying browser alerts for malicious or hacked content, open the report to learn more details about the report, how to fix the issue, and how to submit a reconsideration request after you have fixed the issue. Useful for: Each and Every One | |
| Links report | Displays a list of websites that link to yours, along with the text of the link and any internal link targets within your own website. Suggested use: It is possible to use this tool to find out whether or not your website is linked to by sites that are harmful or helpful. Useful for: SEOs | |
| AMP Test tool | Verify the correctness of an AMP page. Useful for: Developers and technical SEOs will find this useful. | |
| Mobile-Friendly Test Tool | Check to see if a particular page is optimised for mobile use. Useful for: Developers and technical SEOs will find this useful. | |
| Change of Address | Inform Google when you switch your website over to a different domain. Useful for: Website Administrators and Website Designers | |
| Removals Tool | This feature gives you the ability to temporarily prevent URLs on your site from being indexed by Google Search or to clear the search snippet until the next time the document is crawled. Also displays a history of the requests that you have made to block other users, as well as a history of the requests that other users have made to mark pages on your site as adult-only. Useful for: Site proprietors | |
| Crawl Stats | Displays the frequency with which Google crawls your site as well as the number of requests it is making. Suggested application If Google crawl requests are causing your website to become overloaded, you can track the issue on this page and ask for a slower crawl rate. Tip: This report is not available for URL-prefix properties, such as example.com/somepath/; it is only available for domain-level properties, such as example.com, m.example.com, and http://example.com. Useful for: Advanced SEO and website administrators will find this useful. | |
| Associations | In order to enable data sharing and other features between your property and Google Analytics, YouTube channels, Android apps, and other Google services, you will need to manage your property associations. Useful for: Site proprietors | |
| Page Experience | Check to see what percentage of your site’s URLs are missing. Google thinks that a user who visits your page should have a positive experience. This is achieved through a combination of fast page availability, support for HTTPS, and a good experience on mobile devices. Useful for: Site owners and advanced SEOs will find this useful. |
Legacy tools and reports
Although the new Search Console does not yet provide a suitable replacement for these tools and reports in their entirety, you can still access them by following the links provided further down. The team responsible for the Search Console is currently working on a replacement strategy for these individual items.
| Report or tool | Description |
| robots.txt Tester | Check the syntax of your robots.txt file to see if it will prevent a specific URL from being accessed. Suggested use: Use it for checking the syntax of your robots.txt files, as well as for debugging and fixing any blocked resources or pages on your website. Useful for: SEOs and developers will find this useful. |
| *Deprecated* URL Parameters Tool | Tell Google about any special parameters that you use in the URLs of your pages that make significant changes to the page or site, such as a country parameter that changes the content of the site, in order to improve Google’s ability to crawl your website and index its pages. Suggested use: Uses suggested here are only for advanced users; if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could hurt the crawling of your website. Useful for: Advanced SEOs and developers can make use of this resource. |
| International Targeting | Debug the hreflang settings on multilingual websites, or choose a country for your search results to target. Suggested use: It is recommended that you use this when you are adding hreflang tags to your site in order to guarantee correct crawling for various languages or regions. If it is not already clear from the content of your site, use to select a primary target country for your website. Useful for: SEOs |
| Data Highlighter tool | A straightforward instrument that will assist Google in extracting data from the template pages on your website. Suggested use: If your website contains a large number of pages with templated data (for instance, bus routes or event schedules), and if you are unable to use structured data for some reason, you can use this tool to assist Google in extracting similar data from pages that are coded in the exact same way. Every time you make a change to the layout of the page, you will need to retrain Google. Useful for: Beneficial for Owners of Websites Using Free or Cheap Hosting Services |
| Messages report | The newly implemented message panel took its place. |
| Crawl rate settings | Reduce the number of crawlers that Google sends to your website. Suggested use: The only time you should use this is if it appears that Google is trying to overload your website with requests to crawl it. Useful for: Website owners and advanced SEOs will find this useful. |
| Web tools | There are a variety of additional tools that could be useful for your website. |
