How to Connect Your Website to Google Search Console
Add your site as a property, verify you own it, and submit a sitemap so Google can report on your search performance.
Search Console is Google's free report on how your site does in search — the queries you appear for, where you rank, and which pages Google has and hasn't indexed. It shows you nothing until you've proved the site is yours, so setup is really one decision followed by one verification.
Steps
- Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google account. Use one you'll keep — verification is tied to it, and adding colleagues later is easier than moving ownership.
- Choose Add property, then decide between a Domain property and a URL-prefix property. A Domain property covers every subdomain and both http and https at once, but can only be verified by DNS. A URL-prefix property covers just the exact address you type, and accepts several easier verification methods.
- Verify ownership using whichever method you can actually complete: adding a TXT record at your domain registrar (the only option for a Domain property), uploading an HTML file to your site's root, adding an HTML meta tag to your homepage's
<head>, or — if either is already on the site — verifying through Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager. - If you're on a website builder, check its settings first. Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and most WordPress SEO plugins have a field for the Search Console meta tag, which saves editing any code.
- Once verified, go to Sitemaps and submit your sitemap URL so Google has a direct list of the pages you want indexed.
- Wait. Search Console reports on data collected from the verification date forward, so the Performance report stays empty for a day or two and only becomes useful after a few weeks.
- Optional: connect the verified property to datanephew so its search data sits alongside your other numbers. It's a sign-in and picking the property; datanephew reads the property, it doesn't create or verify one for you.
ask datanephew
Which property type did I end up with?
Ask datanephew to check your Search Console connection — a URL-prefix property can quietly miss subdomains or a protocol variant that a Domain property would have caught.
Google says my site is verified, so why is the report empty?
Search Console only reports on data from the verification date onward, and it lags by a day or two. If it's still empty after a week, ask datanephew to check whether your pages are actually indexed.