Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Product
Google's free tool that reports how a site does in Search: indexing, crawling, performance and enhancements.
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Google's guide for generative AI features recommends the Generative AI performance report in Search Console for measuring how content performs in generative AI features on Google Search and Discover.
Google Search Central · Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?
Google's launch post for the Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (3 June 2026; rolled out to all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026) lists impressions, pages, countries, devices (Search only) and dates, and no click or query metrics.
Search Central blog (3 June 2026) · Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?
Search Console Help defines position as the position of a link on Google, where 1 is the topmost position, and says the Performance report shows the topmost position a property's link occupied, averaged across all queries.
Google Search Console Help · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
Search Console Help separates critical issues, which make a structured-data item invalid and stop it from appearing as a rich result, from non-critical issues, listed under 'Improve item appearance'; the Rich Results Test reports valid items that have warnings.
Google Search Console Help · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
To use the Search Console API you need a Google Account with Search Console permission on the property, a project in the Google API Console and OAuth2 credentials (all Search Console APIs except the Testing Tools API need OAuth2).
Google Search Console API documentation · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
Google's status code page says that with a 204 No Content response Google receives no content and cannot process it, and that a 2xx page whose content is empty or an error message shows as a soft 404 in Search Console.
Search Console's robots.txt report shows the robots.txt files Google found for the top 20 hosts of a Domain property, with their fetch status, warnings and errors; to test whether a specific URL is blocked, Google's help page points to the URL Inspection tool and to Google's open-source robots.txt library.
Google Search Console Help · Day 1 · How Google interprets robots.txt
Google's site move guide says to submit a Change of Address in Search Console when moving from one domain or subdomain to another, to submit the new sitemap, and to change internal links on the new site from the old URLs to the new ones.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves
Google's Search Console help says AI Mode groups the user's question into subtopics and searches for each one simultaneously, and that a follow-up question in AI Mode is essentially a new query.
Google Search Console Help · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Google's core updates page recommends waiting at least a full week after a core update has finished rolling out before analysing Search Console data, then comparing that week with a week before the update started.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · What are quality updates
Google's Search Console help says the experimental AI-powered configuration is visible only to a small percentage of users, allows each user 20 requests per day, keeps existing report filters when it adds new ones, and applies its suggested settings only after the user confirms them.
Google Search Console Help · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Google's social and video performance guide says that if you already claimed your Search profile, all of its verified accounts are added automatically as platform properties in Search Console.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Google's launch post for Search Console's branded queries filter (20 November 2025) says the branded versus non-branded split is made by an internal AI-assisted system, not by a regular expression, and that some queries may occasionally be misidentified.
Search Central blog (20 November 2025, updated 11 March 2026) · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
A Search Central blog post on Search Console data limits (October 2022) says the interface exports at most 1,000 rows, while the Search Analytics API and the Looker Studio connector return up to 50,000 rows per day per site per search type.
Search Central blog (19 October 2022) · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Google's blog post on Search Console data limits says anonymized queries are always left out of the report tables but counted in chart totals unless you filter by query, and are left out whenever a filter is applied, so filtered rows do not add up to the chart totals.
Search Central blog (19 October 2022) · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Google's AI features guide says traffic from sites appearing in AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the overall search traffic in Search Console and reported in the Performance report within the Web search type.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Search Console's branded queries filter works only for top-level properties, not URL-path or subdomain properties, and only for sites with enough queries and impressions; Google made it available to all eligible sites on 11 March 2026.
Search Central blog (20 November 2025, updated 11 March 2026) · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Beyond Search Console, Google's AI features guide suggests tracking conversions and time spent on the site in tools such as Google Analytics to understand the value of traffic from AI features.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Google's robots.txt guide says its crawlers update their cached copy of a site's robots.txt every 24 hours, and that the Request a recrawl option in Search Console's robots.txt report refreshes it faster.
Google Search Central, Google Search Console Help · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
John Mueller's slide said Search Console has very few indexing-like settings and listed the Search generative AI control as the one control in his talk that is not a meta tag.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Erin Sparling showed a Search Console result saying a URL would be indexed only under certain conditions, one of which had not been met, and contrasted it with the result for an available URL whose content loads.
Erin Sparling · Day 2 · What is Google friendly JavaScript
Google's planned validation workflow has five steps: download the rules from the feature guide, generate the JSON or embedded microdata or RDFa, run the rules against the generated server-side markup as a first check, deploy and test in the Rich Results Test, and monitor ongoing performance in Search Console.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
The SHACL rules are meant to run inside a site's content generation, so markup is sanity-checked before it is published and does not silently regress later, a breakage site owners might otherwise discover only through a Search Console report.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
The SHACL rules will not replace Search Console as the canonical place for structured data reports, because some checks use Google's internal libraries and cannot be expressed in SHACL, but they will catch problems such as a missing required field.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
'Discovered – currently not indexed' in Search Console is a crawl-scheduling state: Google knows the URL exists but does not want to crawl it yet. Of the two not-indexed statuses discussed, it was called the 'kind of nastier' one.
Google said fan-out queries are not added to Search Console, because Google considers them part of its infrastructure.
John Mueller · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Google said requests to Search Console's AI-powered configuration can be written in any language, not only English.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Google said it is working on adding more platforms to Search Console's platform properties beyond Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
In the example YouTube report shown in Google's Search Console talk, long-form videos still got more traffic and more impressions from Google than Shorts; this was one example channel, not a general finding.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Nik Vujic said that after a page is published, the queries it appears for are the first thing to show up in Search Console, while clicks and impressions come much later.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Search Console removals average about 2 hours because Google pushes removals out to its serving system about every 2 hours.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Google said Search Console's generative AI reporting launched alongside the generative AI control, starting with impressions only, and may expand later.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
Pulling Search Console data through the API required setting up a Google Cloud account to get API access, a community speaker said.
Kira Breuer · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
DNS errors get a site removed from Google Search very aggressively, and Search Console alerts site owners to them.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · How crawling errors affect Search
When Search Console reports network errors, the first step Google recommends is to ask the hosting provider, or the CDN, whether they changed anything.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · How crawling errors affect Search
CDN captcha challenges often return HTTP 200; Googlebot does not solve them and sees only content with a 200 status, which indexing then classifies as a soft 404, reported as an error in Search Console.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · How crawling errors affect Search
Dave Smart said Search Console reports such a block only on the first URL of the chain, which is confusing: the URL shown as blocked by robots.txt is not itself disallowed.
Dave Smart · Day 1 · Lightning session B: Robots.txt
When Search Console says a URL is blocked by robots.txt but the file does not block it, check whether the URL redirects and test every URL in the chain.
Dave Smart · Day 1 · Lightning session B: Robots.txt
The file-type breakdown of crawl requests in Search Console is useful for spotting anomalies, such as most crawling going to images on a site that has no images worth crawling.
To judge crawl efficiency, check Search Console's Crawl Stats report: whether total crawling has plateaued over time, and whether the average response time shows the server is fast enough or is limiting Googlebot.
Google's Q&A slide said that a sitemap not listed in robots.txt has to be submitted instead, for example in Search Console.
To use Search Console to debug what Google can see on a site and why, Erin Sparling said the first step is to get access to the site by verifying ownership (the speaker's words were authorized domains).
Erin Sparling · Day 2 · What is Google friendly JavaScript
Google's duplication talk described three related parts of deduplication: building clusters, localization, and selecting the representative URL, which is the canonicalization site owners see in Search Console.
After a domain consolidation went live, a community speaker's team checked Search Console every day, ran full site crawls and compared the numbers with the pre-migration baseline for months.
Martyna Ağanoğlu · Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves
'Crawled – currently not indexed' in Search Console is an index selection decision: Google crawled and processed the page but decided not to keep it in the index.
Search Console's Page indexing report is the place to check for index selection issues, and its not-indexed reasons are useful when testing changes on a site.
Google's Search Console talk said Google's logs show hundreds of different ways in which people write the query for Britney Spears.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Query groups can change when the meaning of a query changes over time: a 2023 search for 'Gemini' may have meant the astrological sign, but after Google launched Gemini it means something else, so Search Console may now group it differently.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Query groups appear in the Search Console Insights report as a table of the top groups, showing the total clicks of all the queries inside each group, with an option to view a larger table.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Each query group in Search Console is titled with the most prominent query in the group.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Search Console's AI-powered configuration is conversational rather than one-shot: a follow-up request adds changes on top of the configuration already applied.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
In a test by Google's Search Console team, the vague request 'wine-related queries that lead to my site' made Search Console's AI-powered configuration build a regex filter of wine names, such as Merlot, joined by pipe characters, without the user typing the regex.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Search Console added reporting of the impressions a site's content gets in the AI surfaces of Google Search, found in the left navigation nested under Search results.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Google called AI reporting in Search Console an evolving space and expects the generative AI report to get richer, with more information in the future.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Google acknowledged that verifying a website in Search Console, by placing a Google token on the homepage or in the DNS setup, is a relatively high bar for some people.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
A platform property is verified entirely from within Search Console: a pop-up from the platform, for example Instagram, asks the user to grant Google permission to identify the account and its handle, and completing it proves ownership without a token.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Multimodal search reporting in Search Console launched about a week and a half before the 2 October 2026 talk.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
In a demo, asking Chrome about an image on a web page opened a side panel of visual matches, one of which was on Google's developers site and led on to more information about Search Console; Google described this as the full flow of the multimodal traffic now reported.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Nik Vujic said it is super important to export all of a site's Search Console data, and his agency's workflow starts from Search Console's export to BigQuery.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Nik Vujic recommended Looker Studio as a second way to get past Search Console's data limits.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Google estimated that a removal requested by the site owner in Search Console takes effect in about 2 hours on average, from minutes up to 24 hours.
Search Console has a property setting called Search generative AI that gives direct control over AI Overviews and AI Mode without affecting web rankings. Its states are inherit from parent, include and exclude.
A community speaker's example of an LLM error on Search Console data: a chatbot called an average position that went from 8 to 9 an improvement, although position 1 is the top, so the move from 8 to 9 is a decline.
Rafael Kovashikawa · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
To debug crawl issues, Google points site owners to the Crawl Stats report in Search Console, found in the Settings page under Crawl stats.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · How crawling works
Search Console's Crawl Stats report shows how much Google crawls from a site, the errors Google received, and the content types fetched by the different crawlers.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · How crawling works
Search Console's page indexing report breaks down the reasons why pages do or do not show in Search, and its categories help find patterns in how a site's content is crawled and served to Google's crawlers.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · How crawling errors affect Search
Google said soft 404s, like some other problem categories, are looked up in Search Console's page indexing report, while other crawl issues are debugged in the Crawl Stats report.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · How crawling errors affect Search
Search Console's robots.txt report shows the robots.txt file as Google last fetched it, with a version history and the errors and successes of each fetch.
To check whether a site has a crawl budget problem, use Search Console's crawl report (Crawl Stats), which breaks crawl requests down by response and by file type and shows crawl problems Google finds.
Search Console's crawl data separates discovery (fetches of URLs Google has not seen before) from refresh (fetches of known URLs), and lets you drill down to the problematic URLs.
Setting the Search generative AI control in Search Console to exclude keeps a site's links and content out of Search generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, so the site gets no traffic or impressions from them; include is the default.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
To check whether JavaScript content is affected, open the URL Inspection tool in Search Console or the Rich Results Test and look for that content in the rendered HTML tab.
Rebecca Yu · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
The technical steps of a community speaker's domain consolidation included submitting new sitemaps, filing a change of address in Search Console and updating internal links so the new pages did not rely on redirects alone.
Martyna Ağanoğlu · Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves
A community speaker said publishers can also verify their social accounts in Search Console, which makes it easier to track the performance of content repurposed for social platforms.
Patrick Domanico · Day 2 · Lightning session F: Media
Search Console's query groups put together queries that express a very similar user intent but are written differently, for example with more or fewer words or with spelling errors, so site owners can see the intent behind their traffic instead of every query string.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
To show how diverse queries for one intent are, Google's Search Console talk showed a slide titled 'How to spell Britney Spears?' with a long list of spelling variants, citing archive.google/jobs/britney.html.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Google's Search Console team asks for feedback on every new feature, through the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons or any other feedback feature in Search Console, and said it takes that feedback very seriously.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Search Console's AI-powered configuration is a chat box in which users describe the analysis they want in natural language, and the request is transformed into the Performance report's configuration.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Search Console's AI-powered configuration lists the changes it will make to the Performance report and applies them only after the user approves.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
An example request for Search Console's AI-powered configuration was to show queries on phone searches containing the word sports in the last six months.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Search Console has a tool with which every property owner can tell Google whether the site's content may be used in AI search results, because Google wants content owners to control their content.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Search Console's generative AI report shows impressions broken down by pages, countries and devices.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Search Console launched platform properties, which bring social platforms into Search Console, about three or four months before the October 2026 event.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Platform properties let a user verify ownership of an Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube account in Search Console and see the traffic Google sends to that account.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Because platform properties bring many new users to Search Console, Google published documentation and strategy guidance on them, covering how to identify the Search audience, use the 24-hour real-time view, export data and compare platforms such as Instagram and YouTube.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Google's Search Console talk presented multimodal search reporting as its fifth and newest launch, under a 'Hot from the oven' badge.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Multimodal searches reported in Search Console include searches with Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, images uploaded to Google Search and Chrome's right-click search on an image.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
A community slide (Workflow 1) said the first step is to apply the filters you need, even natively in Search Console, for example branded versus non-branded queries, with clicks and impressions.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
A community slide said the Search Console interface export is limited to 1,000 rows.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
A community slide said the Search Console bulk data export to BigQuery gives the most complete query dataset available, with anonymized queries excluded.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
A site owner can submit robots.txt in Search Console to force Google to refresh it sooner.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Before writing code to pull Search Console data for one property, check which data you actually need, what the API can provide and what the API costs, a community speaker advised.
Kira Breuer · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
The resulting monthly report showed Search Console data on one side and an AI-written summary of what happened that month on the other; an in-house AI specialist built the dashboard from the SEO manager's code.
Kira Breuer · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
Google advised checking crawl data in Search Console now and then without obsessing over crawl budget.
An audience member asked what changes to expect in Search Console's reporting on Google's AI features.
From the audience · Day 1 · Q&A
A Google panelist said he expected more AI reporting to launch in Search Console, without a timeline or a promise, because many people at Google care about giving site owners the information to understand and adapt to what happens in Search.
Google's Search Relations team talks with the Search Console team about the API more than before, partly because with so many vibe-coded systems around it is very easy to just say 'use the Search Console API to do something', and it is annoying when Search Console has no API for that.
An audience member asked how a large news site can tell whether crawl budget is limiting how fast new articles are discovered (within minutes), and which statistics in Search Console and the logs show this.
From the audience · Day 1 · Q&A
An audience member asked where the sweet spot is for a sitemap that misses nothing but does not overflow Search Console.
From the audience · Day 1 · Q&A
When Search Console reports that content is not rendering, Erin Sparling suggested putting AI agents on the problem, but only after doing your own due diligence.
Erin Sparling · Day 2 · What is Google friendly JavaScript
After shipping LLM-rewritten image alt text on a client's site, a community speaker saw the site's image performance in Google Search Console drop (no figures were given).
The Day 2 poster topics included technical SEO testing in CI/CD pipelines, internal links that move rankings, Search Console's URL Inspection tool and API, getting everyone on board during complex site migrations, a CMS migration from WordPress to Contentful, the 'global Spanish' problem and going beyond prompts.
Google's Search Console talk at the Deep Dive covered five Search Console launches of the past year: query groups, AI-powered configuration of the Performance report, generative AI control and reporting, platform properties for social accounts, and multimodal search reporting.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Google's Search Console team said query groups have been found very useful and that people are using them.
Ariel Kroszynski · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
In a community lightning talk, agency founder Nik Vujic presented how his agency feeds Search Console and GA4 data to an LLM agent to support decisions for its clients.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Nik Vujic called Google Search Console his favourite SEO tool, used alongside GA4, and said third-party SEO tools give only estimates, although they have some use cases.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
The community workflow's third step feeds the exported Search Console dataset into the agency's LLM agent, which queries the dataset and returns the evidence rather than a sample.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Nik Vujic's slide said no agent is needed to start: pull the Search Console data, import it into any LLM and query it in conversation; his agency built its agent to have everything in one place.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Nik Vujic said his agency uses the Search Console data fed to an LLM in five use cases, the first being cross-comparing and following up different articles.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Nik Vujic said analysing Search Console query data with an LLM also helped his agency spot developer mistakes, such as unwanted pages that got indexed, which can also be found in Search Console itself.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Nik Vujic said some keyword cannibalization is fine because it is logical, but for bad cannibalization his agency groups all of an article's Search Console queries and then decides whether to redirect the pages or rewrite and split the content.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Nik Vujic advised starting every SEO experiment with a hypothesis, for example a bulk change to one page element across a group of pages, and using an LLM to report the group's Search Console data, for example click-through rate, for the test.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Nik Vujic's agency puts Search Console data, LLM referral traffic from GA4 and the data from Search Console's generative AI report into one LLM prompt to compare a client's performance in classic search and in AI features.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Nik Vujic said he hopes Search Console's generative AI report will get query data.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
The stage rule of thumb (under a few thousand URLs crawl budget is unlikely to be a problem) and Google's crawl budget guide (D1-C097: sites with over a million pages that change about weekly, or over 10,000 pages that change daily) leave a middle range where a site should check Search Console's Crawl Stats report before blaming crawl budget for slow indexing.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 1 · How Google thinks about crawl budget
The consolidation described on stage matches Google's November 2020 move from Google Webmasters to Google Search Central, which moved its main blog, 13 localized blogs and the Search help content of the Search Console Help Center to its developer site: about six years before the event, not the four or five said on stage.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 1 · Q&A
Because Web Fragments monkey-patches core browser APIs such as document, history and location, test pages that use it in Google's rendering (the rendered HTML in Search Console's URL Inspection tool or the Rich Results Test), not only in a normal desktop browser.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
After a migration, judge success by the new domain's indexing and traffic in Search Console rather than by a site: query on the old domain, and keep the old domain's redirects in place long term so searches for the old brand still reach the new site.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Handling web duplication
When the SHACL rules appear, wire them into the build or CMS publishing step as an automated test, so a template change that drops a required property fails before deployment instead of surfacing weeks later in Search Console.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Check AI Overviews and AI Mode with native-language queries in each target market, not with translated English keywords, and compare with the country breakdown of Search Console's generative AI performance report; topics where competitors are cited and you are not point to missing or weak local content.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
There is no separate AI index to optimise for: when a page never shows up as a source in AI Overviews or AI Mode, first check that it is indexed, that no nosnippet rule blocks its snippet and that the site is not excluded in Search Console's generative AI setting, the eligibility conditions Google lists.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · How does the index look like?
Google Trends cannot show demand that reaches people through the Discover feed, so Discover visibility has to be judged from Search Console's Discover performance report rather than from Trends.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Google Trends
A Google Trends line that falls over many years is not proof that a market is shrinking; compare terms against each other in the same chart, and take absolute numbers from keyword tools or Search Console impressions.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Google Trends
For audiences that type the same words in two scripts or spellings (Hindi in Devanagari and in Latin letters, German with and without umlauts), check which forms appear in Search Console's queries and use those forms in headings and key text.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Do not build pages for fan-out queries copied from Gemini or other LLM tools: they differ from system to system and Search Console does not report them. Cover a topic's real subquestions on solid pages instead.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
No Google documentation states that fan-out queries stay out of Search Console, but the docs fit the stage statement: the Performance report counts AI Overviews and AI Mode under the user's own queries, and the Generative AI reports have no query dimension.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Review the filters and regexes that Search Console's AI-powered configuration proposes before trusting the numbers: Google's launch post calls the feature experimental, warns that AI can misinterpret requests, and limits it to the Search results Performance report (not Discover or News) and to configuration, not sorting or exporting.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Search Console's generative AI performance reports count impressions only, with no clicks and no query dimension (Google documents the Search report for AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus a separate Discover report), so measure visits that follow AI answers with your own analytics.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Media teams that publish on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or X should add each account as a Search Console platform property and compare formats by URL pattern; Google's July 2026 post says an account already used for a Search profile should already give access to its data.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
A query reaches Search Console's Performance report only through an impression, so queries cannot come before impressions; what rises first after a publish or refresh is the number of queries with a few impressions each, before total impressions and clicks grow noticeably.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Looker Studio lifts Search Console's 1,000-row interface limit but keeps the connector's cap of 50,000 rows per day per site per search type; only the bulk export to BigQuery is free of the daily row limit, so large sites that need every non-anonymized query should use it.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Track trust queries about your brand, such as '[brand] legit', '[brand] reviews' or '[brand] seriös', in Search Console and Google Trends for each market, and answer them on the site, for example with a trust or about page, instead of leaving the answer to third-party review sites.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Mastering the messy middle
Google's finding that AI users visit more brand websites is Google's own research; check it against your own data, such as branded and direct traffic in analytics and the Generative AI performance report in Search Console, before planning on it.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Mastering the messy middle
Plan robots.txt changes a day ahead, because Google may use the old file for about 24 hours; for an urgent change, request a refresh in Search Console instead of waiting.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
To hide a URL from Google Search urgently, use the Removals tool in Search Console (about 2 hours) and also add a noindex or a 404, which takes one to three weeks to drop the page from the index.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Kit items about Search Console: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Track AI feature visibility in the Generative AI performance report
Rests on 11 claims, 7 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Monitor Crawl stats and server logs for verified Googlebot traffic
Rests on 13 claims, 6 of them naming Search Console
Set up the Search Console bulk data export to BigQuery on large sites
Rests on 7 claims, 6 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Rests on 14 claims, 4 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Watch the Page indexing report and treat its not-indexed reasons as a work list
Rests on 10 claims, 4 of them naming Search Console
Add the brand's YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and X accounts to Search Console as platform properties
Rests on 7 claims, 4 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Wire Google's SHACL validation rules into the build once they are published
Rests on 6 claims, 4 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Rests on 20 claims, 4 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
For an urgent removal, use the Removals tool in Search Console and also return 404 or noindex
Rests on 5 claims, 3 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Structure content for readers instead of splitting it into small chunks for AI
Rests on 9 claims, 2 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Never route a crawlable URL's redirects through a URL that robots.txt blocks
Rests on 4 claims, 2 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Rests on 6 claims, 2 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Let verified Google crawlers through firewalls, CDNs and bot protection
Rests on 11 claims, 2 of them naming Search Console
Verify every production host in Search Console before launch
Rests on 1 claim, 1 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Publish XML sitemaps listing only canonical, indexable URLs with accurate lastmod
Rests on 11 claims, 1 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Rests on 2 claims, 1 of them naming Search Console; its own words name Search Console
Also inglossary terms Crawl Stats report, AI-powered configuration, Branded queries filter, Change of Address tool, Generative AI performance report, Platform properties, Query groups, Search Console bulk data export, Crawled – currently not indexed, Discovered – currently not indexed, Multimodal search type, Query fan-out, Raw HTML and rendered HTML, Redirect chain, robots.txt report, Search generative AI control, Search profile, SHACL, URL Inspection tool
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.