Domain or URL-Prefix Property?
Search Console is where Google tells you what it has found on your site, what it has indexed and which searches show it. Set it up on launch day, before you expect any traffic: Google says data collection starts as soon as anyone adds a property, even before it's verified, though data takes a few days to appear.
The first choice is the property type:
| Domain property | URL-prefix property | |
|---|---|---|
| You enter | example.com | https://example.com/ |
| Covers | Every subdomain and protocol: http and https, www and non-www, docs. or app. | Only URLs that start with that exact prefix, protocol included |
| Verification | DNS record only | HTML file, HTML tag, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager or DNS |
| Best for | Most new sites | Tracking one section on its own, or when you can't edit DNS |
Choose a Domain property if you can. It catches visits you'd otherwise miss, such as an old http link or a www version you redirect, and it keeps working if you change hosts. Enter the domain without www; Google includes both versions automatically. You can still add a URL-prefix property later for one section, such as https://example.com/blog/.
To verify through DNS, Search Console gives you a TXT record to add at your domain provider. If your provider is in its list, you can sign in and verify straight away. If you add the record by hand, Google says your provider can take two or three days to start serving it, so wait a day and retry if verification fails. Keep the record afterwards: removing it costs you the verification.
Submit Your Sitemap
Submitting a sitemap only tells Google where the file is; you can't upload one. Google's Sitemaps report docs give the steps:
- Publish the sitemap on your site, ideally at the root, such as
/sitemap.xml. Our technical SEO launch checklist shows how to generate one in Next.js. - Check Google can fetch it by running a live URL Inspection on the sitemap URL and looking for a successful page fetch.
- Paste the URL into "Add a new sitemap" in the Sitemaps report, and submit.
- Read the status. Success means the URLs are queued for crawling. Has errors means only part of it could be read. Couldn't fetch usually means a robots.txt block, a wrong URL returning 404 or a server problem.
Google's sitemap guidelines are short: absolute URLs, UTF-8, and at most 50MB uncompressed or 50,000 URLs per file. Google ignores priority and changefreq, and uses lastmod only when it's consistently accurate, so set it to the date of the last significant change, not the build time. Reference the sitemap in robots.txt as well, so other search engines find it; the robots.txt generator adds the line.
Two things surprise people. A site of about 500 pages or fewer, with every page reachable through links from the homepage, probably doesn't need a sitemap, according to the same docs, though one does no harm. And listing a URL in a sitemap is no guarantee it will be crawled or indexed.
URL Inspection and Requesting Indexing
The URL Inspection tool answers one question about one URL: what does Google know about this page? Paste the URL into the inspection box at the top of Search Console. Two things to understand about the result:
- It shows the indexed version, not the live page. "URL is on Google" means the page is eligible to appear in results, not that it will. "URL is not on Google" comes with the reason.
- The live test is separate. It fetches the page as it is now, and it's the only place to see a screenshot of the rendered page, which is how you check that content loaded by JavaScript is visible to Google.
Also look at the Google-selected canonical. If Google picked a different URL from the one you declared, sort that out first.
From the result, Request indexing adds the URL to Google's queue if the page passes a quick check. Use it sparingly:
- There's a daily limit, and Google says requesting the same URL again won't get it crawled any faster.
- Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and a request doesn't guarantee indexing.
- For a new site, Google's advice is to request indexing of your homepage first, which should start Google crawling the rest. Then request your few most important pages, such as pricing and your main feature pages, and leave everything else to the sitemap.
Reading the Pages Report
The Pages report, under Indexing, counts every URL Google knows on your site, split into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each. On a new site it can look alarming. Google's Page indexing docs make three points worth keeping in mind:
- It can take a week or so for Google to start crawling and indexing a new site.
- Not indexed isn't necessarily bad. Duplicates, redirects and pages you've marked noindex shouldn't be indexed.
- For a site under 500 pages, Google suggests a
site:example.comsearch and URL Inspection on key pages may tell you more than this report.
The reasons you're most likely to meet in the first weeks:
| Reason | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Discovered - currently not indexed | Found, but not crawled yet | Usually wait, and link important pages from your homepage or navigation |
| Crawled - currently not indexed | Crawled but not indexed; common, and not necessarily a problem | For key pages, inspect them and make them more useful and better linked |
| Page with redirect | The URL redirects elsewhere | Expected for the http or www versions you redirect |
| Duplicate without user-selected canonical | Google treats it as a copy of another page | Declare a canonical if Google chose the wrong one |
| Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user | Google disagrees with your canonical | Inspect the URL and check the pages really differ |
| Not found (404) | The URL returned a 404 | Fine for pages you removed on purpose |
The real problems to watch for are an important page blocked by robots.txt or carrying a noindex tag, server errors, and a sudden drop in indexed pages. When you fix one, open that reason and click Validate fix. Google says validation typically takes up to about two weeks, and asks you not to click it again until it has passed or failed.
The Performance Report
The Performance report shows how your site does in Google Search, with four metrics:
- Impressions: how often your site appeared in results.
- Clicks: how often someone clicked through to it.
- CTR: clicks divided by impressions.
- Average position: the average position of your topmost result.
Expect it to be thin at first. Google says it can take up to a week to generate data for a new site, and data normally arrives two to three days late. Days follow California time, so they won't line up exactly with your analytics. Rare queries are hidden to protect privacy and tables show at most 1,000 rows, so the rows won't add up to the chart's totals.
On a new site, impressions arrive long before clicks, and they're the more useful signal. Open the Queries tab to see what Google already shows you for: often not what you expected, and a good source of ideas for specific pages. Pages with impressions but almost no clicks usually need a clearer title and description; the meta tag generator previews them. Switch the chart to weekly to see trends instead of daily noise. Our guide to getting traffic to a new website covers why new domains rank slowly and where visitors come from meanwhile.
Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow
Once Search Console is done, Bing takes a few minutes, and it shows something Google doesn't: Bing's AI Performance report, in public preview, counts how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. Our guide to getting found in AI search covers the other assistants.
The quickest route is to import from Search Console. In Bing Webmaster Tools, open My Sites, click Import, sign in with Google and choose your sites. They're verified automatically, your sitemaps come with them, and traffic data can take up to 48 hours to appear. Bing keeps checking ownership through that Google connection, so if you revoke its access, verify another way, such as a meta tag or DNS record. Bing has its own Sitemaps, URL Inspection and Search Performance reports, which work much like Google's.
IndexNow is an open protocol for telling search engines that a URL was added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for a recrawl. From indexnow.org's documentation:
- Who uses it: Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep support it, and a submission to one participating engine is shared with the others.
- Proving ownership: you host a key file, named after your key with
.txt, at your site's root. The key is 8 to 128 characters of letters, numbers and dashes. - Submitting: one URL in a simple GET request, or up to 10,000 URLs in one JSON POST. A 200 response only means the URLs were received.
- Limits: the FAQ says submissions count toward your crawl quota and don't guarantee indexing. Submit real changes, and wait at least 5 minutes before resubmitting the same URL.
Google isn't on indexnow.org's list of participating engines, so IndexNow doesn't replace your sitemap or Search Console. Many CMSs and CDNs offer it as a setting; on a custom site, send the ping from wherever you publish new pages.
What to Check Each Week
For the first two or three months, a short check once a week is enough. Pick a day and go through this in order:
- Sitemaps: still Success in both Google and Bing, with the number of URLs you expect.
- Key pages: inspect your homepage and your three to five most important pages. Are they on Google, with the canonical you declared?
- Pages report: is the indexed count rising? Has a new reason appeared with important pages in it?
- Performance: impressions for the last 28 days against the period before, new queries, and pages with impressions but few clicks.
- Links: new sites in the Links report, which shows a sample, not every link. Our first backlinks guide covers earning more.
- Manual actions and security issues: rare, but Google reports a manual action in its own report and in the Search Console message center, so open both.
Two things can wait. The Core Web Vitals report often says "No data available" on a new property: it uses data from real visitors in the Chrome UX Report, and a new site often doesn't have enough yet. And week-to-week swings in position mean little while the numbers are small.
Keep a short log too: the dates you launched, submitted the sitemap, published pages and earned links. When a number moves, you'll know why. If you're still collecting your first links, launching on Hauntboard gives your product a permanent, crawlable page, with a dofollow link while our badge is on your site.