What is Google Search Console and what does it tell you about your store?

Search Console is not Google Analytics, which measures what happens inside your site, and it is not Google Merchant Center, which manages product data for Shopping. It is what Google tells you about your site before the click: whether your product pages are in its index, which searches they show up for and how many times people choose them. For a store it is the first-hand source on its relationship with Google Search, and since 2026 on its presence in Google's AI answers too. Google describes it as a free service to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot a site's presence in its results, and makes clear that you do not need to sign up for it to appear in Search.⁠^{[1]Search Console Help. About Search Console}

What it includes

According to Google, Search Console lets you confirm that Google can find and crawl your site, fix indexing problems and request reindexing of new or updated content, see Search traffic data, get alerts when Google finds indexing or spam problems, and see which sites link to you.⁠^{[1]Search Console Help. About Search Console} For a store, that falls into four blocks.

The property. Everything starts with proving the site is yours. There are two kinds of property. A domain property covers all subdomains and protocols (http, https, m.) and is verified with a DNS record. A URL-prefix property only covers URLs that start exactly with the prefix you give, protocol included, and supports several verification methods.⁠^{[2]Search Console Help. Add a website property to Search Console} If your store lives on www, on the root and on a blog subdomain, the domain property is the one that sees it all together.

Performance. The performance report gives four metrics: clicks, impressions, CTR (clicks divided by impressions) and average position, that of your site's highest result. You can slice them by query, page, country, device, search appearance and date.⁠^{[3]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results)} Each metric has fine print. A search impression counts when someone has seen, or could have seen, a link to your site, even if they did not scroll down to it. All data is assigned to the canonical URL that Google picks. And an AI Overview takes up a single position: every link it contains gets that same position.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?} The available history goes back 16 months.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}

Indexing. The page indexing report says how many URLs on your site are indexed and groups the rest by reason, and the URL Inspection tool gives the status of one specific URL.⁠^{[5]Search Console Help. Page indexing report} The entry on indexing explains how to read them.

Google's AI. This is the new part. Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode were already part of total search traffic, under the "Web" search type in the performance report.⁠^{[6]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} What has been added is a separate view. The generative AI performance report shows your site's impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, that is, how many times links to your site were shown in a generative AI feature, grouped by page, country, device and date. Google rolled it out to all sites worldwide on August 31, 2026, and it does not appear if your site has not yet accumulated enough impressions in those features.⁠^{[7]Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search)} The same day, the Search Console generative AI control finished reaching all properties, under Settings: "include," which is the default, "exclude," or inherit the parent property's value. Excluding the site takes it out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative features, usually takes a few days to apply and, according to Google, is not used as a ranking signal in the rest of Search.⁠^{[8]Search Console Help. Search generative AI control}

In a store

A backpack store filters the performance report to a single page, its best-selling product page, and looks at the queries tab for the last three months. This is a fictional example: the queries and figures are made up to show how to read the table, and they do not describe any real store.

Three readings that work for any store. The second row is the opportunity: thousands of impressions with a tiny CTR at a position close to the first page, so the title or the description is not answering that search. The third says Google associates the product page with biking, and the store decides whether that is true. And the gap between the sum of the rows and the chart total is not an error: anonymized queries, the ones very few people make, are left out of the table for privacy but count in the total, and the table has a maximum of 1,000 rows.⁠^{[9]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results): Troubleshooting data discrepancies}

How to check it

1. Add the domain property and verify it with the DNS record, so that all of the store's subdomains and protocols are included.⁠^{[2]Search Console Help. Add a website property to Search Console}
2. Open the performance report, filter by a product page and go to queries. Look at the ones with many impressions and a low CTR: there the page shows up but does not convince.⁠^{[3]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results)} Remember that data usually takes two to three days to arrive and that days are counted in Pacific time, so the last day is almost never complete.⁠^{[9]Search Console Help. Performance report (Search results): Troubleshooting data discrepancies}
3. Review the page indexing report and confirm that your main product and category pages are among the indexed ones; duplicate or alternate ones should not be.⁠^{[5]Search Console Help. Page indexing report}
4. Look at the generative AI performance report, if your site already has it: which pages get impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and from which countries.⁠^{[7]Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search)}
5. Check the generative AI control under Settings. If nobody has touched it, it will be on "include"; if someone excluded the site, your pages stop showing in those features after a few days.⁠^{[8]Search Console Help. Search generative AI control}

Related concept: Microsoft's equivalent tool

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's equivalent, and on the AI side it measures something else. Since February 10, 2026 it has a report in public preview, AI Performance, that counts the times your content is cited as a source in the AI-generated answers of Copilot, Bing's summaries and some partner integrations, with the cited pages and the phrases the AI used to retrieve them.⁠^{[10]Microsoft, Webmaster Tools blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview} Search Console, by contrast, gives impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.⁠^{[7]Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search)} Both tools are free and complementary: a store makes sense in both, because neither sees what the other sees.

To keep going, the measurement and verification reading path puts the rest of the terms in order, and the entry on publication verification explains how to check that what you publish reaches the page Google reads.