Is Google Search Console free?

Yes. It is free for anyone who can prove they own or manage the site. There is no paid tier. If someone else built your website, make sure the Search Console property is verified under a Google account you control, and add them as a user rather than leaving them as the only owner.

What is the difference between Search Console and Google Analytics?

Search Console shows what happens in Google Search before someone reaches your site: queries, impressions, clicks, positions and indexing. Google Analytics shows what visitors do once they arrive, from every source. You need both: one tells you whether you are being found, the other whether visits turn into enquiries.

Why does Search Console show different numbers from Google Analytics?

They count different things. Search Console counts clicks from Google Search results; Analytics counts sessions, which can be lost to cookie consent choices, ad blockers or tracking errors, and attributes some Google traffic differently. Expect them to differ. Use each for the question it answers rather than trying to reconcile them exactly.

SEO 6 min read Sajid Aslam5 October 2026

Google Search Console: A Guide for Business Owners

The free tool that tells you what Google actually thinks of your site. Twenty minutes a month is enough, if you know where to look.

Search Console Performance and Pages reports for a business website

Short answer

Google Search Console is Google's free tool showing how your site performs in Search. Verify it as a Domain property, submit your sitemap, then check monthly: the Performance report for queries, clicks and impressions, the Pages report for indexing problems, URL Inspection for individual pages, and the Core Web Vitals and Manual actions reports for anything broken.

Google Search Console is the free tool Google provides to show how your website performs in its search results: which searches you appear for, how often people click, which pages are indexed, and whether anything is broken. For a business owner it is the single most useful source of SEO information available, and it costs nothing.

This guide covers setting it up and the handful of reports worth checking each month. It is written for owners and managers rather than SEO specialists. Where it fits in an overall plan is set out in SEO for small businesses.

Setting up Search Console

Go to Google Search Console and sign in with a Google account the business controls.
Add a Domain property if you can. It covers every version of your site (http, https, www, non-www and subdomains) in one place. It is verified by adding a DNS record at your domain registrar.
If DNS access is difficult, a URL-prefix property can be verified with an HTML file, a meta tag, or Google Analytics or Tag Manager.
Submit your XML sitemap under Sitemaps. On WordPress it is often at /sitemap_index.xml or /wp-sitemap.xml.
Under Settings, Users and permissions, add anyone who helps with the site as a user. Keep ownership yourself.

Data starts collecting from verification, so set it up as early as possible, ideally before a new site launches.

The Performance report: how you are found

This is the report you will use most. It shows, for Google Search:

Metric	What it means
Total clicks	Times someone clicked through to your site
Total impressions	Times a link to your site appeared in results the user saw
Average CTR	Clicks divided by impressions
Average position	Your average ranking position across those impressions

You can view the data by query, page, country, device, search appearance and date, with up to 16 months of history. AI Overviews and AI Mode appearances are counted within the Web search type rather than shown separately here.

Useful things to do with it

Find pages with impressions but few clicks. Sort pages by impressions and look for low CTR. These are usually title and description problems, covered in how to improve organic search CTR.
Find queries at positions 8 to 20. You are close to page one. Improving the page that ranks for them is often the quickest win.
Find queries you did not plan for. New queries are free keyword research. Keyword research for small businesses covers how to use them.
Compare periods. Use the date comparison to check before and after a change, comparing equal lengths of time.

Branded and non-branded queries

Search Console now has a branded queries filter, introduced in November 2025 and expanded to all eligible sites in March 2026, that separates searches containing your business name from everything else. It is available on top-level properties. Non-branded queries are the better measure of whether SEO is bringing in new people, because branded searches mostly come from people who already know you.

Annotations

Since late 2025 you can add your own annotations to the Performance chart: a redesign, a new service page, a migration. They make it far easier to explain changes months later.

The Pages report: what is indexed

Under Indexing, Pages you can see how many of your URLs are indexed and, more importantly, why the others are not. Common reasons:

Status	What to do
Excluded by noindex tag	Check it is intentional
Crawled, currently not indexed	Usually thin or duplicate content; improve or consolidate the page
Discovered, currently not indexed	Google knows the URL but has not crawled it; improve internal links
Duplicate, Google chose different canonical	Check canonical tags and near-duplicate pages
Page with redirect	Normal for old URLs; make sure internal links point to the final URL
Not found (404)	Fix or redirect if the page had value

Not every excluded URL is a problem. Redirects and deliberately noindexed pages are expected. The question is whether pages you want in Google are missing. The stages behind these statuses are explained in how Google crawls and indexes a website.

URL Inspection: one page in detail

Paste any URL from your site into the search bar at the top. It shows:

whether the page is indexed
when it was last crawled
the canonical you declared and the one Google chose
the rendered HTML and a screenshot from the live test, and which structured data was found

You can also request indexing for a new or updated page. Use it for important pages, not as a routine for every edit; it does not make Google rank a page faster.

Other reports worth knowing

Sitemaps: confirms Google can read your sitemap and how many URLs it found.
Core Web Vitals: real-user speed and stability data, grouped by page type. What the metrics mean is covered in Core Web Vitals explained.
HTTPS: pages not served securely.
Enhancements: structured data such as breadcrumbs, products and videos, with errors. See schema markup for business websites.
Manual actions: if a person at Google has penalised the site. This should say no issues detected.
Security issues: hacked content or malware.
Links: top linking sites and your most-linked pages, useful as a rough check.
Generative AI performance: a newer report showing impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, rolled out to all sites by the end of August 2026 for properties with enough data. At the time of writing it reports impressions rather than clicks. Its context is covered in how to appear in Google AI Overviews.

A 20-minute monthly routine

Performance, last 3 months compared with the previous 3. Are non-branded clicks and impressions moving?
Pages report. Any new reason for pages not being indexed?
Queries at positions 8 to 20. Pick one or two pages to improve.
Low-CTR pages. Rewrite one title and description.
Core Web Vitals, Manual actions, Security issues. Confirm nothing new.
Add an annotation for anything you changed on the site this month.

That is enough for most small businesses. Do not check daily: the data is noisy and daily swings mean very little.

Common ways Search Console data gets misread

What you see	Common misreading	What it usually means
Average position improved, clicks fell	SEO is getting worse	You lost impressions on some queries, or the mix of queries changed
Average position got worse, clicks rose	Something is wrong	You started appearing for many new queries in lower positions, which drags the average down
Lots of "not indexed" URLs	The site has a serious problem	Often redirects, parameters and deliberate noindex pages, which are expected
Impressions jumped overnight	A ranking breakthrough	Sometimes a reporting change, a seasonal spike or appearing on a new search feature; check the queries
A page has no data	Google ignores it	It may simply have had no impressions in the period, or it may not be indexed; check with URL Inspection

The most common misreading is treating average position as a score. It is an average across every query a page appears for, so it moves for reasons unrelated to how well your main pages rank. Look at specific queries and pages instead.

Email alerts you should not ignore

Search Console emails the property owners about significant issues: new indexing problems, manual actions, security problems, Core Web Vitals regressions. Make sure those emails reach someone who will read them, not an old developer's inbox.

Search Console during a redesign or migration

Search Console is your main early-warning system when you change a website. Before any redesign, export the top pages and queries so you have a baseline, and watch the Pages report daily for the first few weeks after launch. If you are moving to a new domain, the Change of Address tool is also here. The full process is in the website migration SEO checklist.

Next step

If you have never set Search Console up, or someone else did and you cannot log in, sorting out access is the first job. A review of what your data is telling you, and a prioritised list of fixes, is how the SEO service usually begins.