Google Search Console
Google Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners to see how their site does in Google Search and fix what stops it showing up.
Google Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners. It shows how your site does in Google Search: which searches you appear for, how often people see and click your pages, which pages Google has indexed, and anything that stops your pages showing up. Until 2015 it was called Google Webmaster Tools.
If you do any SEO, it's the one tool you should have set up, because it's the only place Google tells you directly about your own site.
What's in it
The Performance report lists the searches that showed your pages, with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position. The Page indexing report shows which pages are in Google's index and why others aren't. The URL Inspection tool lets you check a single page, see the HTML Googlebot received, and ask Google to crawl it again. Manual actions and security problems are reported here too, along with Core Web Vitals.
AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search Console
Google says it includes AI Overviews and AI Mode in the Performance report, under the "Web" search type, mixed in with the rest of your search traffic. So you can see that your pages appeared and were clicked, but you can't easily pull the AI answers apart from the ordinary results, or see the answers themselves.
For example, Fernhill Coffee might see impressions for "best coffee subscription UK" climb by 40% while clicks stay flat. One reason can be an AI Overview at the top that shows Fernhill's page as a link and answers the question before anyone scrolls. Search Console shows the numbers, and you need to look at the answer to know why.
In AnswerOrbit
You can connect Search Console in Settings, under Connections. Google doesn't share its AI Overviews report with other tools yet, so for now what you see of Google's AI answers in AnswerOrbit comes from asking them ourselves: the answers, the brands they name and the pages they link to. See Settings and How we count.