Google Search Console is Google’s free tool for site owners. It shows how Google crawls, indexes and displays a site in search results: the queries that bring impressions and clicks, the pages Google has and hasn’t indexed, and problems that stop pages from appearing. It’s the only place to see Google’s own search data for your site.
Since June 2026, Search Console has a separate Generative AI performance report. Google’s announcement says it shows how often your URLs appeared in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, broken down by page and date, and that the same data still counts in the main Performance report. It shows impressions only. There are no clicks, so a visit from an AI Overview still looks like any other Google search click.
The reports B2B teams use most
| Report | What it tells you | When to check it |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, by query, page, country and device | Weekly |
| Page indexing | Which URLs Google indexed, and the reason each excluded URL was left out | Monthly, and after any site change |
| URL Inspection | How Googlebot sees one URL, including the HTML it received | When a page isn’t appearing as expected |
| Sitemaps | Whether Google can read your sitemaps, and how many URLs each one submitted | After a migration or new section launch |
| Links | Top linking sites, most-linked pages and most common link text | Quarterly |
| Manual actions | Whether Google has penalised the site by hand | After any sudden traffic drop |
| Generative AI | Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page and date | Monthly |
URL Inspection catches what audits miss
Google’s documentation recommends URL Inspection for checking whether a snippet control is set correctly, because it shows the HTML Googlebot received. That matters for AI search: a page must be eligible to show with a snippet before Google can cite it in AI Overviews or AI Mode. On my own site, I found the SEO plugin was adding max-snippet:50 to every page, quietly capping how much Google could quote. Nothing in the page builder showed it. The rendered HTML did.
What Search Console shows B2B teams
For a Canadian proptech platform, the Performance report tracked a 45.3% rise in search impressions in the four months after a domain migration. That’s how we confirmed the redirects had carried the old site’s visibility over. For a snow day prediction tool built from zero, it logged 2.51 million impressions over one winter at an average position of 6.3. For a specialty paint manufacturer with more than 300 coatings, the Page indexing report showed product pages Google had found but not indexed, which was where the lead growth work started.
Limits to know before you report from it
- Data goes back 16 months. Export it regularly if you need longer history.
- Google hides some rare queries for privacy, so query totals add up to less than page totals.
- Average position is averaged across every impression. One query ranking first and another ranking 40th can show as position 20, which describes neither.
- It covers Google only. Microsoft Copilot citations appear in Bing Webmaster Tools, which reports them page by page. For a Canadian taxation SaaS product, that’s where we measured 76.2K Copilot citations in 12 months. Search Console has no equivalent.
Search Console and GA4 together
Search Console stops at the click. GA4 starts at the visit. Google publishes guidance on combining the two, and on a B2B site you need both: Search Console tells you which searches find you, and GA4 tells you whether those visitors book a demo.
Common mistakes
- Reading site-wide average position as a health score.
- Treating an impression drop as a ranking drop without checking the queries. Losing one high-volume irrelevant query can look like a collapse.
- Ignoring the Page indexing report until traffic falls.
- Setting up a URL-prefix property instead of a domain property, which misses subdomains and protocol variants.
- Skipping Bing Webmaster Tools, and with it the only first-party AI citation data available.
Related terms
GA4 · XML sitemap · Crawl budget · Organic traffic · AI Mode
