How to run an SEO audit with Google Search Console

Google Search Console has no button labelled “audit”. What it has is something no third-party tool can offer: Google’s own record of which of your URLs it crawled, which it indexed, which searches showed them and how real Chrome users experienced them. Running an SEO audit with Google Search Console means reading those reports in a deliberate order, so that each one answers a question the previous one raised.

On a small site, this Google Search Console SEO audit takes about an hour. Use a Domain property if you can, because it covers every protocol and subdomain; a URL-prefix property can hide problems on hostnames it does not include.

Step 1: Read the Page indexing report

Open Indexing → Pages. The chart splits your known URLs into indexed and not indexed, and the table underneath lists the reasons pages were left out. A large “not indexed” number is normal on sites with parameters, redirects and pagination. The real question is whether any page you want to rank appears in that table.

Switch the filter at the top from “All known pages” to “All submitted pages”. That limits the report to URLs in your sitemaps, which are the pages you have told Google matter.

Reason	What it means	What to do
Crawled – currently not indexed	Google fetched the page and chose not to index it for now	Check whether the page is thin or near-duplicate; improve or consolidate it
Discovered – currently not indexed	Google knows the URL but has not crawled it yet	Strengthen internal links to it; check server response times
Duplicate without user-selected canonical	Google picked a different URL as the canonical	Add a canonical tag to the version you prefer
Alternate page with proper canonical tag	The page points to an indexed canonical	Nothing; this is working as intended
Page with redirect	The URL redirects elsewhere	Fine, unless your sitemap or internal links still use it
Soft 404	The page looks empty or “not found” but returns 200	Return a real 404 or 410, or add the missing content
Excluded by “noindex” tag	A noindex directive is present	Remove it if the page should rank
Blocked by robots.txt	A Disallow rule stops crawling	Remember this does not reliably keep a URL out of the index

Google says the example list under each reason is capped at 1,000 URLs, and an issue stays in the report for 90 days after its last instance disappears (Page indexing report help). After you fix a reason, click Validate fix once and wait; validation typically takes up to about two weeks.

Step 2: Inspect one URL per template

The indexing report tells you what is excluded. URL Inspection tells you why, one URL at a time. Pick one URL for each template on your site: home page, a category or service page, an article or product, and the contact page.

For each one, check:

1. Page indexing: whether the URL is on Google.
2. User-declared canonical against Google-selected canonical. If they differ, Google is ignoring your preference, usually because of duplicate content or conflicting signals.
3. Crawled as: it should say Googlebot smartphone.
4. Test live URL → View tested page: compare the rendered HTML and screenshot with what visitors see. Missing text here usually points to content that only appears after JavaScript runs.

Google says the live test does not check duplicate or canonical conditions, so a passing live test does not guarantee the page will be indexed.

Step 3: Find pages losing ground in the Performance report

Open Performance → Search results and switch on all four metrics: clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. The report keeps 16 months of data, enough for a year-over-year comparison on seasonal sites.

1. Set the date filter to Compare the last three months with the previous three months (or the same period last year).
2. Open the Pages tab and sort by the click difference. The pages at the top lost the most traffic; start there.
3. Open the Queries tab and look for queries with high impressions and a low CTR while the average position is between 1 and 10. Those are usually title tag and meta description problems, not ranking problems.
4. Look for queries sitting at positions 8 to 20. Those pages are close enough that better content and internal links can move them.

The table will not add up to the chart total. Rare queries are anonymised and left out of the table, but they still count in the totals (Google’s deep dive on Performance data).

Step 4: Check the generative AI performance report

Google says it introduced Search generative AI performance reports on June 3, 2026, and that as of August 31, 2026 they are available to all websites (Search Central announcement). The Search report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode; Discover has a separate report. You will find it listed under Performance in the left-hand menu.

What the report gives you:

• Impressions only. An impression is counted when a link to your site is shown in an AI feature. There are no clicks, no CTR and no query dimension.
• Pages, countries, devices and dates, with hourly to monthly granularity.
• No data for small sites. If your site has not received enough AI feature impressions, the report may not appear. It also does not include Search Labs experiments, and it will not appear if you have excluded your site from Search generative AI features in Settings.

How to use it in an audit: export the Pages table and put it next to the Pages tab from Step 3. Our view: pages with rising AI impressions and falling clicks are the ones where an AI answer may now satisfy the searcher before they reach you. Informational pages with no AI impressions at all are worth checking for snippet controls and for content that only loads with JavaScript.

Step 5: Review Core Web Vitals by device

Open Experience → Core Web Vitals and review mobile and desktop separately. The report uses field data from real Chrome users and groups similar URLs together. A group’s status is its worst metric at the 75th percentile of visits.

Metric	Good	Needs improvement	Poor
Largest Contentful Paint	2.5 s or less	up to 4 s	over 4 s
Interaction to Next Paint	200 ms or less	up to 500 ms	over 500 ms
Cumulative Layout Shift	0.1 or less	up to 0.25	over 0.25

Click into a failing group, open one example URL and note which template it uses. Template-level fixes repair every URL in the group at once. Low-traffic sites often see “No data” here because there are not enough real-user visits; in that case use lab measurements from the Core Web Vitals checker instead. The Core Web Vitals glossary entry explains each metric.

Step 6: Scan the Links report

Open Links. The external section lists your most-linked pages, the sites linking most and the most common anchor text. The internal section lists the pages that receive the most links from your own site.

Two checks are worth the time:

• Internal links. Compare the internal list with the pages that earn you money or leads. A key page with very few internal links is close to being an orphan page.
• Anchor text. Unfamiliar anchors in a foreign language or about unrelated topics are a sign of spam links pointing at you.

Google says the report is a sample, not a full list of every link, and it does not say whether a link is nofollow (Links report help). For a fuller picture, see the backlink analysis guide.

Step 7: Check sitemaps, removals and the warning panels

• Sitemaps: every submitted sitemap should show “Success” and a discovered-page count close to what you expect.
• Removals: a temporary removal lasts about six months, then the URL can return. Check that nobody left an old request active. To remove a page permanently, return a 404 or 410, put it behind a password or add noindex.
• Manual actions and Security issues should both say no issues detected.
• Settings → Crawl stats: look at host status, and at the share of requests returning redirects or server errors. A rising share of 3xx responses often means redirect chains in your internal links.

What Search Console cannot show you

Search Console reports only what Google sees, and only for sites you have verified. These gaps need another source:

Gap	Why it matters	Where to check
Titles, meta descriptions, headings, alt text	Search Console does not report missing or duplicate on-page elements	A page-level audit or the meta tag checker
AI crawler access	Robots rules and CDN blocks for OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot are invisible to Google	The robots.txt tester and the AI crawlers guide
Citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude	Search Console covers Google surfaces only	The AI visibility checker
Clicks from AI features	The generative AI report is impressions only	Not separable in Search Console today
Security headers and certificate expiry	The Security issues report covers hacking and malware, not configuration	A full audit’s security checks
Competitors	You can only see verified properties	Third-party tools

The free SEO audit covers the on-page, security and AI crawler gaps for any URL in about a minute, and it scores what it finds using the weights published on the methodology page.

What to do next

1. List every page you want ranked that appears in a “not indexed” reason, and fix those first.
2. Rewrite titles and descriptions for high-impression, low-CTR queries from Step 3.
3. Fix the worst Core Web Vitals group by template, then validate.
4. Run the free audit on your home page and one page from each template to cover what Search Console cannot see.
5. Work through the full SEO audit guide for the crawl-level checks this walkthrough skips.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google Search Console enough for an SEO audit?

It is the best source for how Google itself crawls, indexes and shows your pages, but it does not check titles, meta descriptions, security headers, AI crawler access or competitors. Pair it with a page-level audit and a crawl of your own site.

How much history does Search Console keep?

The Performance report covers the last 16 months. Issue reports such as Page indexing keep an issue listed for 90 days after its last instance disappears, so a fixed problem can linger in the report for a while.

Does the generative AI report show clicks from AI Overviews?

No. It reports impressions only, broken down by page, country, device and date. AI Overviews and AI Mode activity is still included in the overall Performance report, but it is not separated out there.

What access should I give someone who audits my site?

Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO suggests giving an auditor read access rather than full or owner permissions. Read access is enough to view every report covered in this walkthrough.

How often should I repeat a Search Console audit?

A short weekly look at Page indexing and Performance catches most problems early. A full pass like this one is worth doing monthly and after every redesign, migration or major release.