What Google Search Console is, what it reports, and how it counts AI features

Search Console is Google's free web tool for seeing your site the way Google Search sees it.

Google is clear that you don't have to sign up to be included in results. The tool exists to help you understand and improve how Google finds, crawls and shows your pages.

It does five main jobs. It confirms that Google can find and crawl the site, surfaces indexing problems and lets you request re-indexing of new or updated pages, and shows Search traffic data. It also sends alerts when Google hits indexing, spam or other issues, and lists which sites link to yours.

All you need is a recent Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari with cookies and JavaScript on, and a Google account.

Most people open Search Console for the Performance report.

By default it shows the last three months of clicks and impressions from Google Search. You can add CTR, which is clicks divided by impressions, and average position, which is the average position of the topmost result from your site.

The table groups data by queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance or dates, and a filter splits traffic into web, image, video and news. Web is further split into text-based and multimodal searches, which include Google Lens and Circle to Search.

The newest data can be preliminary and change over the next few hours, shown as a dotted line on the chart. Chart totals and table totals can differ because the chart aggregates by property while page groupings aggregate by page.

Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode isn't hidden. Google says sites appearing in those features are counted in the overall Performance report, within the Web search type.

On 3 June 2026 Google announced separate Search Generative AI performance reports, with dedicated views for Search and Discover. They show how often your URLs appeared in generative AI features, which pages appeared, and breakdowns by country, device and date.

The rollout started with a subset of sites and reached all websites worldwide by 31 August 2026.

Google's AI optimization guide also says a site must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console to be eligible to appear in them.

Google names four groups. Business owners should know it exists even if someone else runs it. SEO specialists and marketers use it to watch traffic and shape how results look. Site administrators use it to catch server errors, load issues, hacking and malware, and developers use it to find markup problems such as structured data errors.

It's also the source to trust over outside tools. Google's guide says no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems, and recommends verifying your site in Search Console to find and diagnose technical issues quickly.