Google Search Console integrations and automation

Search Console tells you how Google sees a site: which queries showed your pages, how often they were clicked, and whether Google could index them. Its web interface is good for looking; the API is what you use when you want the same numbers for a fixed list of pages every week, or kept past the interface’s 16-month window. The API has three main parts: Search Analytics for performance data, URL Inspection for the index status of one URL, and Sitemaps for listing and submitting sitemaps.

Search Analytics queries take a property, a date range and dimensions such as query, page, country, device and date, and return clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. Two details catch people out. Data is a couple of days behind, so a report for “yesterday” is usually empty; end the range a few days back. And the property type matters: a domain property and a URL-prefix property for the same site can return different totals, and the account authorising the connection must have access to the exact property you name. Rows per request are capped, so large sites need to page with startRow.

The catalogue’s weekly SEO audit template reads a list of URLs from a Google Sheets tab every Monday, fetches each page, pulls its last 28 days of clicks and impressions from Search Console, asks AI for notes on title, meta description, headings and content, fills the sheet’s columns, and posts the five pages with the fewest clicks to Slack. The numbers come from the API; only the notes are AI-written and may vary between runs.

URL Inspection has its own daily and per-minute quota per property, far lower than Search Analytics, so inspecting every page of a large site each day is not realistic. Inspect the pages that changed or matter most.