Search Console is the only place where Google tells you, directly and for free, what it did with your pages. Every other tool guesses. The reason most store owners abandon it is that the interface presents twenty reports of equal visual weight, of which five matter to a shop and the rest are noise until something specific goes wrong. This is a tour of the five, written for someone who does not want to become an SEO.
One setup note first, because it invalidates everything else if you get it wrong: verify the domain property, not just the URL prefix. A domain property covers http, https, www and non-www together. A URL-prefix property covers only the exact variant you entered, which is how people end up looking at a fraction of their data and drawing confident conclusions from it.
1. Pages: what is indexed, and what is not
Open Indexing → Pages. The top number is how many of your URLs Google has indexed; below it is the list of reasons for everything it has not. For a store, three reasons appear constantly and mean very different things. "Crawled — currently not indexed" usually means Google saw the page and judged it not worth storing, which on a store often points at thin or duplicated category and filter pages. "Discovered — currently not indexed" means it has not even fetched it yet, frequently a crawl-budget symptom on large catalogs. "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" means your filter or sort URLs are competing with each other.
- Crawled, not indexed: the page exists but did not earn a slot
- Discovered, not indexed: crawl budget or internal linking problem
- Duplicate, no canonical: filter and sort URLs fighting each other
- Excluded by noindex: check nothing important is in this list
The single most valuable habit here is to check the noindex list after every redesign or migration. A staging directive left in production is the most common cause of a store disappearing from search, and this report shows it plainly — what to do when rankings drop after a redesign covers the rest of that emergency.
2. Performance: the queries you actually win
Performance shows impressions, clicks and average position by query and by page. Two habits make it useful. First, filter out branded queries — searches containing your store name — because they flatter every report and hide whether you are winning anything new. Non-brand clicks are what reflect your SEO work. Second, sort by impressions with low click-through. Those are queries where Google shows you but nobody chooses you, which is usually a title and description problem you can fix in an afternoon.
Comparing periods is where the real signal lives. Compare the last 28 days with the previous 28, then with the same period last year, because seasonality will otherwise convince you that a normal January is a catastrophe.
3. Core Web Vitals: your real customers, not a lab test
The Core Web Vitals report uses field data — measurements from actual Chrome users on your site — grouped by URL patterns. This is a meaningfully different thing from a PageSpeed score, which is a simulation on one synthetic device. If the report says a group of product pages is failing on mobile, that is your customers' experience, and the sample is real. Fix at the group level: these reports cluster pages by template, which is exactly how storefront work should be scoped.
4. Shopping and product snippets
If you have product structured data, Search Console reports what it could parse and what it rejected. Errors here mean your rich results are not appearing — missing price, missing availability, invalid review markup. The Merchant listings and Product snippets reports are the fastest way to catch a schema regression after a theme or plugin update, which is the usual cause of a store quietly losing its rich results without anyone touching SEO.
5. Manual actions and security
These two reports are almost always empty, which is why nobody checks them, and they are the two that matter most when they are not. A manual action means a human reviewer penalised the site; a security issue means Google has detected malware, hacked content or deceptive pages and may be showing a warning to your visitors. If either is populated, everything else on this list is irrelevant until it is resolved — start with what to do when your store is hacked and request a review only after the entry point is actually closed.
The two tools people misuse
URL Inspection is genuinely useful: paste any URL and see whether it is indexed, which canonical Google chose, and what the crawler rendered. Use it after fixing something, to confirm the fix. The Removals tool is not what people think — it hides a URL from results temporarily, roughly six months, without deindexing anything. It does not remove anything from the index, so using it to "clean up" achieves nothing durable. It is for emergencies, such as a page that leaked data, and the durable fix is always a noindex tag or a 410.
A ten-minute monthly routine
Open Pages and look only at whether the indexed count moved sharply. Open Performance, filter out brand, compare 28 days to the previous 28, and note any page that lost meaningful clicks. Glance at Core Web Vitals for a new failing group. Check that manual actions and security are still empty. That is the whole routine, and it will catch the majority of problems while they are still small — the ones that get expensive are the ones nobody noticed for three months.
Search Console is not an SEO tool. It is Google telling you what it did with your store, and it is the only source that is not guessing.