SEO glossary

Google Search Console (GSC)

Google Search Console is a free Google service that shows how a website performs in Google Search and helps its owner fix problems. It reports the queries, clicks, impressions and average positions a site earns, flags crawling and indexing issues, and lets owners submit sitemaps and request indexing of new or changed pages.

Reviewed by Gareth Hoyle, Managing Director
Last reviewed 31 October 2026

Where did Search Console come from?

Google renamed Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console on 20 May 2015, saying the old name reflected only some of the people using it. A rebuilt version reached all users in January 2018 and left beta on 4 September 2018. A site doesn't need to be registered in Search Console to appear in Google's results.

What are the main reports?

Performance: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position by query, page, country and device, with 16 months of data
Page indexing: which URLs are indexed and the reasons others are not
URL Inspection: how Google crawled, indexed and canonicalised a single URL, with a live test and a request indexing button
Sitemaps: submit sitemaps and see what Google read from them
Links: the sites linking to yours and the most linked pages within it
Manual actions and security issues, shown on the overview page when there is one

Reading the Performance report

Average position is the position of the topmost result from the site, averaged across the queries or pages selected. In the chart, two results from the same site for one query count as a single impression. The default view covers the last three months, so widen the date range before comparing year on year.

Example

After a site migration, an online retailer filters the Performance report by page and compares the 28 days before launch with the 28 days after. Clicks to category pages hold steady, but product pages lose impressions. URL Inspection shows Google still treating the old product URLs as canonical, which points to a missing redirect rule.