Search Console data is everything Google tells you about your site's presence in their search results. You get four core metrics: impressions (how often your pages showed up), clicks (how often people clicked), average position (where you ranked), and click-through rate. You also see which queries triggered your pages, which pages got the most visibility, and how you perform on mobile versus desktop. Beyond traffic data, Search Console flags technical problems Google encounters when crawling your site. This includes indexing errors, mobile usability issues, Core Web Vitals scores, structured data problems, and security issues. If Google can't crawl a page or finds duplicate content, you'll see it here first. The data has real limitations. Google samples aggressively once you pass certain thresholds, so high-traffic sites don't see every single query. There's also a 16-month retention limit, meaning historical data older than that disappears. Position averages can be misleading because they blend page-one and page-five rankings into one number. At Ottawa SEO, we export Search Console data weekly and store it in BigQuery or Google Sheets to preserve history beyond 16 months. We cross-reference it with Google Analytics because the click counts often don't match perfectly due to tracking differences, but Search Console is more accurate for search-specific metrics since it comes straight from Google's index. The real value is in the query report. You see exactly what people typed before landing on your site, which keywords you rank for that you didn't optimize for, and which pages are underperforming despite decent rankings. If a page averages position 8 but gets zero clicks, that's a meta description problem. If impressions are climbing but clicks stay flat, your titles aren't compelling enough. You access it free at search.google.com/search-console after verifying ownership of your domain. For agencies managing multiple clients, the API lets you pull data programmatically, which is essential when you're tracking 500+ domains like we do.