Google Search Console Audit: The Complete Checklist

Why audit in Search Console first

Crawler tools guess how Google sees your site. Search Console shows what Google actually did: which pages it crawled, which it chose not to index and why, which queries showed your pages, and how often people clicked. If a crawler tool and Search Console disagree, Search Console wins, because it is Google's own record.

Most Search Console audit guides online were written before 2024 and still point you to reports that no longer exist. Three things to know before you start:

• The Coverage report is now called Page indexing (Indexing > Pages).
• The Mobile Usability report and the robots.txt Tester are gone. Google retired both in late 2023. Use URL Inspection and the robots.txt report under Settings instead.
• FID is no longer a Core Web Vital. INP replaced it in March 2024. The Good thresholds are LCP 2.5 seconds or less, INP 200 ms or less, CLS 0.1 or less (Google).

And a few things are new and worth using:

Sources: Google Search Central blog posts linked in the Sources sheet of the checklist.

The 9 areas of a Search Console audit

The checklist is a spreadsheet. Each row has the area, the check, where to click, what good looks like, what bad looks like, the fix, a priority (P1, P2, P3), a status dropdown and a notes column.

1. Setup and settings (13 checks): property type, verification, users, robots.txt, crawl stats, host status, email alerts.
2. Performance (18 checks): pages and queries losing clicks, CTR at the same position, branded vs non-branded, striking-distance queries, AI Overviews visibility.
3. Page indexing (24 checks): every "Why pages aren't indexed" reason with what it means and the fix.
4. Sitemaps (6 checks): status, contents, lastmod, old sitemaps.
5. Experience (8 checks): Core Web Vitals on mobile and desktop, HTTPS, pop-ups.
6. Enhancements and Shopping (6 checks): structured data errors, product and merchant listings, retired rich results.
7. Security and manual actions (4 checks): manual actions, hacked content, new spam policies.
8. Links (5 checks): internal links to key pages, orphan pages, links to dead pages.
9. Monitoring routine (3 checks): weekly check, after each Google update, after each release.

Start with these 10 P1 checks

If you only have 30 minutes, do these. They are the ones that can cost you most of your traffic.

How to find pages losing clicks (and why)

This is the single most useful check. In Performance > Search results, click Date, then Compare. Pick the last 3 months against the previous 3 months, or against the same 3 months last year if your business is seasonal. Open the Pages tab and sort by Clicks difference.

Now click the first page that lost clicks and open the Queries tab. Look at two numbers for each main query:

• Position went down (for example 3 to 9): you lost rankings. Compare your page with the pages now above you. What do they answer that you do not?
• Position stayed the same, CTR went down: you did not lose rankings. Something on the results page now takes the click. Search the query yourself and look for an AI Overview, ads, a map pack or video results above you.

Worked example (fictional site). northwind-outdoors.com sells camping gear. Its page "how to choose a sleeping bag" lost 1,140 clicks quarter over quarter. Position for the main query held at 2.1. Impressions went up 6%. CTR fell from 9.8% to 4.1%. Searching the query shows an AI Overview with a temperature-rating list at the top. This is not a rankings problem, so a rewrite for "SEO" would not help. The fix: open the page with a one-line answer, then give what a summary cannot: a sizing chart for their own bags, a comparison table with real prices, and a "which bag for which trip" picker. Retitle the page to promise that ("Sleeping Bag Temperature Ratings, With a Size Chart").

Branded vs non-branded: the number that tells the truth

If your total clicks look fine, check again with the branded filter (Performance > Search results > Add filter > Query > Non-branded). Our branded vs non-branded guide shows how to read the split. Branded clicks come from people who already know you. Non-branded clicks are how new people find you, and that is what SEO grows. Google says branded queries usually rank higher and get higher CTR (Google), so they can hide a real drop.

The filter only shows for top-level properties with enough data. If you do not see it, use Query > Custom (regex) and exclude your brand name and its common typos.

Page indexing: read the reasons, not just the number

In Indexing > Pages, the table "Why pages aren't indexed" lists each reason. Some reasons are normal. Some cost you traffic. The checklist covers all of them; here is how to sort them fast:

• Usually fine: Alternate page with proper canonical tag, Page with redirect, Not found (404) for pages you deleted on purpose.
• Fix now if key pages are listed: URL marked 'noindex', URL blocked by robots.txt, Server error (5xx), Blocked due to access forbidden (403), Redirect error.
• Quality and crawl signals: Crawled - currently not indexed, Discovered - currently not indexed, Duplicate without user-selected canonical, Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user, Soft 404.

One tip most guides skip: change the dropdown from All known pages to All submitted pages. Now you only see the URLs you told Google are important (your sitemap). Fix those first. For each reason in depth, see our indexing problems guide.

Core Web Vitals, HTTPS and crawl health

Open Experience > Core Web Vitals, then the Mobile report (how to read the Core Web Vitals report). Fix by template, not page by page. One slow product template can put 2,000 URLs in "Poor". After you fix it, open the issue and click Start Tracking; Google watches real-user data for 28 days before it calls the issue fixed.

Then open Settings > Crawling > Crawl stats (full walkthrough: Crawl Stats in Search Console). Three things to scan: Host status (should be green), average response time (watch the trend), and responses by type (mostly 200 OK). A firewall or bot-protection rule that blocks Googlebot often shows up here before it shows up as lost traffic.

How often to run a Search Console audit

• Full audit: every quarter, and after any redesign or migration (for moves, see our site migration SEO checklist).
• Weekly (5 minutes): Insights, the indexed count, new emails from Search Console.
• After a Google update: wait until the Search Status Dashboard shows it done, then one more week. Google recommends comparing the week after the rollout ends with the week before it started (Google).

What an AI assistant can and cannot check

Who this is for

• Site owners and marketers who have Search Console set up but are not sure what to look at.
• Freelancers and agencies who need a repeatable audit for each new client.
• Anyone whose traffic dropped and who wants to rule out technical causes before rewriting content.

Use SEOmatic to run the Google Search Console audit checklist on mysite.com.

1. Run check_site on mysite.com for a free first look (homepage indexability, robots.txt, sample of sitemap pages).
2. Then run connect_seomatic so I can sign in and connect Search Console.
3. Run get_started for mysite.com for the overview.
4. Performance checks:
- gsc_performance action compare_periods, dimension page, then dimension query: list the 10 pages and 10 queries that lost the most clicks.
- For each of the top 5 losing pages, use gsc_performance action query_pages to say whether position dropped or only CTR dropped.
- gsc_insights action brand_split: show branded vs non-branded clicks.
- gsc_insights action ctr_outliers: pages with CTR far below expected for their position.
- gsc_insights action cannibalization: queries where 2 or more of my pages compete.
- gsc_insights action seasonality: tell me if the drop matches last year's pattern.
5. Indexing and sitemaps:
- gsc_insights action sitemaps: status of every submitted sitemap.
- gsc_indexing action batch_inspect on my 20 most important URLs (top pages by clicks plus key product or service pages): report verdict, coverage state and Google vs user canonical.
- site_audit: noindex leaks, canonicals pointing elsewhere, broken internal links, dead pages, duplicate or missing titles and metas.
6. Give me one table: check, result (pass or fail), evidence (numbers and URLs), fix, priority P1/P2/P3. Sort by priority, then by clicks at stake.
7. For the failed checks you can fix, use task_manage action create to stage the fixes as proposals for my approval, then show_approval_cards. Do not execute anything I have not approved.
8. List the checks you could not run with these tools (Core Web Vitals report, Manual actions, Security issues, Crawl stats, Users and permissions) with the exact Search Console menu path so I can check them myself.