AI search and working with a developer
What is Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free tool showing how Google crawls, indexes and ranks your site — impressions, clicks, queries, coverage errors and Core Web Vitals field data. It is the only source of your own query data, and it is not optional.
Also called: Google Search Console · GSC
What to use it for first
- URL Inspection → Test Live URL → View Crawled Page, which shows what Google actually received
- Coverage, to find pages that are not indexed and why
- Performance, filtered by page, for the queries a specific page already earns impressions on
- Core Web Vitals, which reports field data rather than lab scores
The report people misread
"Discovered — currently not indexed" usually means the URL was found and judged not worth crawling yet, which is a quality and internal-linking signal. Resubmitting the sitemap does not change it, and doing so repeatedly is the most common wasted afternoon in SEO.
Verify by DNS
DNS verification survives site changes, redesigns and supplier changes, and cannot be removed by a former developer. HTML file or tag verification can vanish in a redeploy, usually at the least convenient moment.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers this properly — 4 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.