Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners. It is the only source of Google's own data about how your pages perform in search, and it shows indexing problems you cannot see anywhere else. Bing Webmaster Tools does the same for Bing, which also supplies results to other search products.

Step 1: choose a property type

	Domain property	URL-prefix property
Covers	All protocols, subdomains and paths, for example example.com	Only URLs that start with the exact prefix, for example https://www.example.com/
Verification	DNS record only	HTML file, HTML meta tag, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, or DNS
Best for	Most sites, if you can edit DNS	When you cannot edit DNS, or for tracking one section separately

Step 2: verify ownership

1. Go to search.google.com/search-console and add the property.
2. For a Domain property, Google gives you a TXT record. Add it in your domain provider's DNS settings.
3. Return to Search Console and click Verify. DNS changes can take a while to spread, so retry later if it fails at first.

Verification stays valid as long as the token remains. If someone deletes the DNS record or meta tag later, the property loses its verified status. Write down which method you used.

Step 3: submit a sitemap

Open Sitemaps, enter your sitemap URL (often /sitemap.xml) and submit. You can also list it in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line. Google calls a sitemap a hint: it helps discovery but does not guarantee crawling.

Step 4: understand the Performance report

Metric	Meaning
Impressions	How many times your site appeared in results
Clicks	How many times someone clicked through to your site
CTR	Clicks divided by impressions
Average position	The average of your topmost position across impressions

Search Console keeps about 16 months of performance data. If you want a longer history for year-on-year reports, export the data regularly.

Step 5: use URL Inspection

Paste any URL from your property into the search bar at the top. It shows:

• Whether the URL is on Google, and when it was last crawled.
• The canonical URL you declared, and the one Google chose.
• Whether crawling or indexing is blocked.

Test live URL checks the current version. Request indexing asks Google to consider the page, but Google says this does not guarantee indexing, and there is a daily limit. Use it for a few important new or fixed pages, and rely on sitemaps for the rest.

Step 6: add Bing Webmaster Tools

At bing.com/webmasters, choose to import from Google Search Console. Bing connects the sites you have already verified, along with their sitemaps, so you do not repeat verification. If you later revoke Bing's access to your Google account, you will need to import or verify again.