Google Search Console is the only place Google tells you directly how it sees your site: which queries you appear for, which pages it has indexed, which ones fail Core Web Vitals and whether anything is broken. It is free, and most businesses look at it once a quarter, if that.
When we first wrote this post in 2019, the news was video reports, breadcrumb reports and 24-hour data. All three shipped and have since been reworked. A lot of other reports have been removed. This is the 2026 version: what is in Search Console now, what has gone, and the reports we actually open every month for SEO clients.
What has been retired from Search Console
If you are following an older guide, these are the things you will not find:
- Legacy tools and reports. The old interface and the "legacy" menu are gone entirely.
- URL Parameters tool. Removed in 2022. Google now works out parameter handling itself.
- International Targeting report. Removed in 2023. Hreflang still works; you just can't check it here.
- Mobile Usability report and the Mobile-Friendly Test. Both removed at the end of 2023. Use Lighthouse or the Core Web Vitals report instead.
- Page Experience report. Removed in 2023. The signals it summarised live on in the Core Web Vitals and HTTPS reports.
- Crawl rate limiter. Removed in early 2024.
- First Input Delay. Replaced by Interaction to Next Paint in the Core Web Vitals report in March 2024.
- HowTo enhancement report. Removed when HowTo rich results were dropped in 2023. The FAQ report still exists but FAQ rich results are now limited to government and health sites, so it is rarely worth your time.
- Structured Data Testing Tool. Replaced by the Rich Results Test and the schema.org validator.
The lesson in that list: Google removes reports it no longer wants you to optimise for. If a report disappears, it is usually a signal about what matters, not just a product decision.
The Performance report in 2026
This is the report everyone uses and still the most valuable. It shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for Google Search, Discover and Google News, with 16 months of history.
24-hour and hourly data
The daily data we flagged as new in 2019 has become a dedicated 24-hour view with hourly breakdowns. It is the fastest way to confirm whether a fix, a migration or a launch did what you expected, without waiting the usual two days for the main report to fill in. Treat the numbers as provisional. They settle after a few days.
AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic
The question we get most in 2026. Google counts clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the Performance report, inside the normal Web search type, and has published how that counting works in its AI features documentation. What you do not get, as of writing, is a filter that separates AI traffic from standard results. If you see impressions rising while clicks and position hold flat, an AI Overview appearing above your result is the first thing to check by hand. We cover how to diagnose that pattern in our post on organic traffic falling in the age of AI search.
Filters worth learning
- Regex filters on queries and pages. One expression to isolate every brand variant, every question query or every URL in a section.
- Compare mode. Compare the last three months with the previous three or with the same period last year, then sort by click difference to find decaying pages.
- Search appearance. Shows clicks from specific result types such as video, product snippets or review snippets, which tells you whether your structured data is earning anything.
- Query grouping. Google has been adding grouping of similar queries over the last couple of years. Useful for scanning; keep using the raw rows for decisions.
Search Console Insights
Insights, the plain-language summary that was once a separate experiment, now sits inside Search Console. It shows which content is growing, which queries drove it and what is new. Good for a quick monthly scan or for sending to a client who will not open the full report.
Indexing reports
Page indexing
The old Coverage report became Page indexing in 2022. It splits every known URL into indexed or not indexed and gives a reason for each exclusion. The two reasons worth your attention are "Crawled, currently not indexed" and "Discovered, currently not indexed". The first usually means Google saw the page and judged it thin or duplicate. The second means Google knows the URL exists but has not bothered to fetch it, which points to crawl budget or internal linking problems. Both are content and architecture issues, not technical errors.
After you fix a group of pages, use Validate Fix. Google re-crawls the affected URLs and reports back, usually within a couple of weeks.
Video pages
The video reporting we covered in 2019 is now the Video pages report under Indexing. It shows which pages Google recognised as having a video and whether that video was indexed, with reasons when it was not (video too small, not the main content, thumbnail problems). If you host product or explainer videos, this is where you find out whether Google can see them at all.
Sitemaps and Removals
Sitemaps still works as it always has: submit, check it was read, watch the discovered URL count. The Removals tool temporarily hides a URL from results for about six months, which buys time for a proper fix with noindex or a redirect. It is not a permanent removal.
URL inspection
Paste any URL from your property to see Google's last crawl, the indexing status, the canonical Google chose, any enhancements detected and the rendered HTML. Test Live URL fetches the page right now. Request Indexing asks Google to queue a crawl. It helps for new or updated pages; it does not help a page Google has already decided not to index.
Experience reports
Core Web Vitals
The report groups URLs by whether they pass Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, using field data from real Chrome users over the previous 28 days. Thresholds are published on web.dev. INP is the one that catches sites out, because it measures responsiveness to every interaction on the page, not just the first, and the fix is almost always JavaScript.
Read the report by URL group, not by URL. Google clusters similar pages, so one template fix typically clears hundreds of URLs. Small sites may see no data at all; Google needs a minimum amount of real user traffic before it will report.
HTTPS
Shows how many indexed URLs are served over HTTPS and lists the exceptions. There should be none. If there are, it is usually old internal links or a redirect gap after a migration.
Enhancement reports
Each structured data type Google supports for rich results gets its own report, which appears once Google detects that markup on your site. The ones most businesses will see: Breadcrumbs, Product snippets, Merchant listings, Review snippets, Sitelinks search box (though Google stopped showing that feature in 2024), Logos and Videos.
The breadcrumb report we highlighted in 2019 is still there and still useful. Google shows breadcrumbs in place of URLs in most results, so a broken BreadcrumbList means an ugly snippet. Each report lists valid items, items with warnings and errors, and lets you validate a fix once you have deployed it.
To debug a specific page, use the Rich Results Test. You can search within the detected markup and copy the offending block, which still saves time when a plugin has mangled the JSON-LD.
Recommendations
Google added a Recommendations section to the overview in 2024. It surfaces suggested actions: pages with rising queries you could expand, structured data you could add, sitemap issues. The suggestions are generic and not always right for your site, so treat them as a prompt to look rather than a to-do list. They are at least based on your own data, which makes them better than the average SEO tool alert.
The reports under Settings
Two useful things hide under Settings. The Crawl stats report shows how often Googlebot visits, which response codes it gets, how much time it spends on each file type and whether host problems are throttling it. It is the first place to look if new pages take weeks to appear. The Bulk data export, added in 2023, pushes your full Performance data to BigQuery every day. It is the only way to keep more than 16 months of history and get past the row limits in the interface. For a site with more than a few thousand queries, set it up now and thank yourself next year.
Also under Settings: ownership verification, user management, the change of address tool for domain migrations, and the association with Google Analytics 4, which lets you see Search Console data inside GA4 reports.
Links, manual actions and security
The Links report shows top linking sites, top linked pages and internal link counts. It is a sample, not a complete backlink profile, but the internal links view is useful: important pages with very few internal links are easy wins. Manual actions should always read "No issues detected". If it doesn't, stop everything else. Security issues flags hacked content and malware, usually before you notice yourself.
A monthly Search Console routine
This is the check we run for every account. It takes under an hour once you know where things are.
| Report | What to check | Action if it looks wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Performance, compare 28 days vs previous | Pages with the biggest click drop | Check for an AI Overview, a new competitor, or a title rewrite |
| Performance, queries filtered to position 8 to 20 | Terms close to page one with real impressions | Improve the page and add internal links |
| Page indexing | Growth in "not indexed" reasons | Consolidate thin pages, fix internal linking |
| Core Web Vitals | URL groups moving from good to poor | Diagnose the template in PageSpeed Insights |
| Enhancements | New errors after a site update | Fix the markup, validate |
| Manual actions and Security | Anything other than no issues | Drop everything |
| Crawl stats | Spikes in 5xx or a falling crawl rate | Talk to the developer or host |
Search Console does not tell you why rankings changed and it will not tell you what competitors are doing. It tells you what Google did with your site. Read it with that in mind, pull the data into Looker Studio if you want trends over time, and treat every retired report as a hint about where Google's attention has moved. If you want someone else to run this routine and act on it, that is what a technical SEO audit and ongoing SEO retainer with us looks like in practice.
