Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.

In a nutshell:

It shows how Google sees your website—so you can fix issues, improve visibility, and get more clicks.

Key uses:

  • See what keywords bring people to your site.
  • Submit sitemaps and request indexing.
  • Monitor search performance (clicks, impressions, CTR).
  • Identify crawl errors, broken links, or mobile issues.
  • Get alerted about security or manual penalties.

Getting Started

  1. Head on over to https://search.google.com/search-console
  2. Sign in with your Google Account and add a property.
  3. Choose Domain or URL Prefix depending on your needs. If you have access to DNS records (you’ll need to add a DNS record to confirm ownership), Domain is a better choice because it covers all subdomains (e.g. blog.site.com), and protocols (e.g. http, https). If you don’t have access to DNS, the URL prefix method has multiple options for verifying your site, such as HTML files, tags, and GA tracking. The rest of the steps here assume you have DNS access.
  4. To verify your ownership of the domain, go to your DNS provider and add a new TXT record. Enter ‘@’ for the host name. Search Console will provide the content for the text record for you to cut and paste. It will look something like google-site-verification=U6z9PBL1VQ2YM4F7aDSXmZu-tmVN2OxB4-iDV5Oiazw Note that it may take a few hours for DNS to propagate.

That’s it! You’re done! You have successfully configured Search Console for your domain.