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Guide · Google Search Console, in a desktop browser

Set up Search Console and verify your site

Without Search Console you are guessing. It is the only place where Google tells you which queries bring your pages impressions and which addresses sit in the index. It costs nothing, and setting it up takes twenty minutes.

Why this matters is explained in Website not showing up on Google: how to find the actual cause.

How to do it

  1. Open search.google.com/search-console and sign in with the Google account that belongs to the business. Verification will hang on this exact account later, so it is worth one thought up front about who should own it.The private account of the summer help who leaves in September is the wrong place for it. Other people can be added as users later.
  2. Open the property selector at the top left and click „+ Add property“ at the bottom of the list.
  3. Choose the website option. The same list also offers a platform property for Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube, which belongs to a different guide.
  4. Now comes the one real decision: a „Domain property“ or a „URL-prefix property“. A domain property covers everything belonging to the domain, including www, the subdomains and both protocols, and asks for a record at your domain provider in return. A URL-prefix property covers exactly the address you type, and can be verified without access to the domain settings.If you can reach the DNS settings of your domain, take the domain property. Otherwise the URL prefix saves you the detour, and a second property can be added at any time.
  5. For the domain property, Google shows you a TXT record. You add it at your domain provider under the DNS settings, then finish verification in Search Console. It usually takes minutes for the record to be known everywhere, occasionally hours.
    Type:  TXT
Name:  @
Value: google-site-verification=YOUR-VALUE-FROM-GOOGLE
  6. For the URL prefix, Google offers „HTML file upload“, „HTML tag“, „Google Analytics tracking code“ and „Google Tag Manager container snippet“. In a website builder the HTML tag is usually the shortest way: a meta tag for the head of every page, which goes into the field for custom code that most systems keep in their settings.
    <meta name="google-site-verification" content="YOUR-VALUE-FROM-GOOGLE">
  7. Leave in place whatever you installed, whichever way you took. Google checks the verification again and again, and if the DNS record, the file or the tag disappears, you lose the property and with it the data.
  8. Finally, submit your sitemap. „Sitemaps“ sits in the left column under „Indexing“, and the address of your sitemap.xml goes in there.It helps with the first find. Without a sitemap Google still finds your pages as soon as a link points at them, it only takes longer.
    https://your-address.com/sitemap.xml

How you can tell it worked

Your address then sits in the property selector at the top left, and the left column shows „Performance“, „URL inspection“ and, under „Indexing“, the „Pages“ report. Give it a few days before you look for numbers: Search Console starts collecting on the day of verification and shows nothing for the time before, and Google's help puts the first data a few days out.

Search Console shows Google Search. Anyone arriving through Bing or through an AI answer does not appear in these numbers. It also counts impressions and clicks in the result, so everything up to the click. What happens on your site afterwards is the job of an analytics tool.