If you've seen "Google Search Console" or "GSC" in maptrics and wondered what it is, you're in the right place. In short: it's a free tool from Google that shows how your website performs in Google Search. When you connect it to maptrics, we use that data to surface rankings, opportunities, and content changes in one place.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (often shortened to GSC) is Google's official tool for site owners. It reports how Google sees your site: which search queries lead people to your pages, how many times your pages appeared in search results (impressions), how many people clicked (clicks), and the average position your pages hold for those queries.

You don't need to be technical to get value from it. The main idea is: GSC tells you what people search for when they find you, and how your pages rank and perform. That's the same data we use in maptrics to show search performance, content opportunities, and decay alerts.

What data does GSC provide?

Queries – The actual search terms people typed in Google that led to your pages.
Clicks – How many users clicked your site from those search results.
Impressions – How many times your pages were shown in search results (whether or not anyone clicked).
Position – The average rank (e.g. 3.2 means your page tended to appear around position 3) for a query or page.
CTR (click-through rate) – Clicks divided by impressions; how often a listing led to a click.

All of this is per page (URL) and per query, so you can see which pages and which keywords drive traffic and where you have room to improve.

Why it matters for SEO

Without GSC, you're mostly guessing. With it, you can see which content actually gets found, what people search for to get there, and where you rank. That helps you:

Double down on content that already ranks and improve it further.
Find queries where you rank on page 2 or 3 and tweak content to move up.
Spot pages that used to get traffic and have dropped (content decay).
Understand which topics and pages Google values for your site.

GSC is free; you just add and verify your site (or property) in Search Console. Once it's connected, maptrics can use the same data inside your dashboard.

How maptrics uses GSC

When your team has access to the GSC integration in maptrics, we pull this data and show it where it's most useful:

Search performance – Overview of clicks, impressions, position, and CTR over time so you see trends at a glance.
Content opportunities – Queries and pages where small improvements (e.g. better titles or content) could lift rankings and traffic.
Content change / decay – Alerts when pages that used to perform well start losing visibility, so you can update or fix them before the drop gets worse.

So "GSC" in maptrics isn't a separate product—it's the same Google Search Console data, organized and combined with your crawl and URL data so you can act on it in one place.

Next steps

If you use Google Search Console already, you can connect it in your website settings and then upgrade your plan if needed to unlock GSC insights in maptrics. If you've never used it, head to search.google.com/search-console to add your site; once data is flowing, we can use it to show how your pages rank and how your content improves over time.