How to set up Google Search Console

Sign in at search.google.com/search-console with the Google account the business will keep, not an agency’s and not an employee’s personal account that leaves with them. Choose “Add property”. Google offers two kinds, and its help page explains both: a domain property, which covers every version of the site, and a URL-prefix property, which covers one exact address and everything beneath it.

Choose the domain property if you can edit the domain’s DNS records, and the URL-prefix property if you cannot.

Google verifies ownership before it shows anything, by one of the methods its help page lists.

• DNS record: for a domain property, copy the TXT record Google shows into the domain’s DNS settings at the registrar or at Cloudflare, then press Verify. A few minutes can pass before it is seen.
• HTML file: for a URL-prefix property, upload the small file Google gives you to the root of the site.
• HTML tag: paste the meta tag into the head of the home page. Website builders have a field for it in their SEO or marketing settings.
• Google Analytics or Tag Manager: if the site already carries one of them under the same Google account, Google can verify through it.

Keep the record or the tag in place after verifying. Removing it removes the verification, and with it the data.

A sitemap is a file listing the site’s addresses, usually at /sitemap.xml, and most platforms produce one. Open Sitemaps in the left-hand menu, enter the address and press Submit; Google’s help page explains the status column. “Success” means Google read the file. It does not mean every address in it will be indexed: Google says it may crawl or index none of them, and the sitemap only tells it what exists.

The Page indexing report is the first one to read, a week or so after the sitemap is in. It shows how many pages are indexed and sorts the rest by the reason they were left out. Each reason has a guide in this series, from crawled, currently not indexed to blocked by robots.txt. A new site with a short list of indexed pages and a sitemap submitted days ago is normal; a site a year old with most pages excluded is not.

The Performance report shows the searches the site appears for and the clicks they bring. Set the date range to the last three months and read three things: the Queries tab, for the searches that bring impressions; the Pages tab, for which pages Google shows; and clicks against impressions, which shows where the site is shown and not chosen. A site whose only searches are its own name is indexed and has work to do on its pages.

The Core Web Vitals report groups pages by how they loaded for real visitors in Chrome: good, needs improvement, or poor. It appears only once enough visitors have been measured, so a new or small site may see nothing here for months. Where it does appear, the pages marked poor are the ones to fix first; Core Web Vitals explained says what each measurement means.

Open Settings, then Users and permissions, and add an agency or a colleague by their Google account, as a user and not as an owner. Our guide to sharing Search Console and Analytics access sets out which role to give and how to remove it. Nobody needs the account’s password.

Search Console emails the owner when it finds a new problem, and those emails are worth keeping on. Finish by inspecting one address with the URL Inspection tool: paste the home page’s address into the bar at the top and read Google’s verdict on it. “URL is on Google” is the result a working set-up gives. Anything else names the next thing to fix, and why your website is not showing up on Google takes it from there.