The essential reports
- Performance: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position by query, page, country and device, over 16 months.
- Page indexing: indexed and non-indexed pages, with the reason for each exclusion.
- URL Inspection: a page's status, the canonical Google chose, the last crawl and indexing requests.
- Sitemaps: submitting and monitoring sitemap files.
- Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP and CLS measured on real visitors.
- Links, Manual actions and Security issues.
Reading the Performance report correctly
Average position is not calculated the same way everywhere: in the chart, it is the average position of your site's topmost result; in the table, it is the position of the URL or query on each row. The most recent data is preliminary and may still change. To investigate a drop, compare equivalent periods, filter by a page or a group of queries, and look at the last 16 months to separate a seasonal dip from a real decline.
Setting up Search Console
There are two property types. A Domain property is verified with a DNS record and covers every subdomain and protocol, which makes it the most complete. A URL-prefix property covers a single starting address and accepts other verification methods, such as an HTML file, a meta tag or Google Analytics. Then add users with the right permission level and link the property to Google Analytics 4.
What Search Console does not show
No competitor data and no market search volumes: only your own impressions. Very rare queries are hidden to protect searchers' privacy, so query-level totals add up to less than the overall total. History stops at 16 months, so export your data through the API or bulk data export if you need a longer record for year-over-year reporting.