Google Search Console for beginners: see the questions your customers ask

To see the questions customers ask Google, open Google Search Console, go to Performance, then Search results, and read the Queries tab. It lists the phrases that showed your site in search, with impressions, clicks and average position for each. Filter for question words to get a list of real customer questions, free.

What Search Console is used for: your customers already told Google what they want

An illustrative example, not one of our customers: a bakery owner in Leeds is sure her customers search for "best sourdough in Leeds". She opens Search Console for the first time and finds something else near the top: "can you freeze sourdough bread", shown 300 times last month, clicked eleven times. Her site appears for it on page two because a product page mentions freezing in one line.

That is the whole value of Search Console in one example. It replaces guessing with the exact words people typed. Some of those words are questions you have never answered on purpose.

Ahrefs found that around 93% of search keywords get fewer than 10 searches a month. Most of the phrases you will see are small. Together they are where a small business wins, because big sites rarely answer them.

Set it up in twenty minutes

Search Console is free. You need a Google account and access to your website's settings or your domain's DNS.

Choose the property type

Google offers two kinds of property. A Domain property covers every version of your site, with and without www, on http and https, and any subdomain. It is verified through a DNS record at your domain registrar. A URL-prefix property covers only the exact address you enter, and it can be verified in more ways, such as an HTML tag or file.

If you can reach your DNS settings, choose Domain. You will not have to wonder later which version of the site the numbers belong to.

Verify on your platform

Each website builder has a slightly different path, and they change their menus from time to time, so check your platform's current help page:

• Wix: the SEO settings include a Search Console connection that handles verification for you.
• Shopify: verify a Domain property through DNS, or paste Google's HTML tag into your theme for a URL-prefix property.
• WordPress: most SEO plugins have a field for Google's verification tag, or you can use DNS.

Then submit your sitemap. Most platforms create one at /sitemap.xml.

Give access without giving away the keys

Search Console has three levels: Owner, Full and Restricted. Google describes Restricted as simple view rights on most data. That is enough for an agency, a freelancer or a tool that only needs to read and report. Keep Owner for yourself, and remove access when a working relationship ends.

The first report to open: Performance

Click Performance, then Search results. You will see four numbers across the top:

• Total clicks: how many people came to your site from Google search.
• Total impressions: how many times your site appeared in results, seen or not.
• Average CTR: clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: where you appeared, on average. 1 is the top.

Below the chart there is a table with tabs. Queries is the one that matters most for this guide. Pages shows which of your pages earned those impressions. Clicking a single query and then switching to the Pages tab tells you which page Google matched to that question.

The newest days in the report are preliminary and can still change, so compare full weeks and read trends rather than single days.

Find the questions

In the Queries tab, add a filter: Query, then Custom (regex). Paste a pattern that catches question words at the start of a query:

^(how|what|why|can|which|is|does|do|when|where|should)

You now have a list of the questions that brought your site impressions. Sort by impressions. The top of that list is what people ask most often in your field and connect, at least loosely, with your site.

Read it slowly. Three things usually jump out:

1. Questions you answer well. They have clicks and a good position. Leave those pages alone for now.
2. Questions you answer by accident, in one line of a page about something else. They have impressions and few clicks. Each of these is a candidate for its own answer page.
3. Questions about price, delivery time, compatibility or returns. These are buying questions. They are worth the most and they need the most care, because a wrong number on them costs trust.

Find the pages that are close

Switch on Average position at the top so the column appears, then filter the table for position greater than 3. Look for pages with plenty of impressions and positions roughly between 4 and 20. That is the striking distance: Google already considers the page relevant, and a better answer could move it up.

Why bother? Backlinko measured that moving up a single position lifts click-through rate by 32.3% on average, and that the second page of results gets 0.63% of all clicks. A page at position 12 is almost invisible. The same page at position 6 starts to get visitors.

What helps these pages is usually not more words. It is a direct answer near the top, headings that match the follow-up questions, internal links from your product or service pages, and an honest update date.

What about AI answers?

Google says that when your pages appear in its AI features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, those appearances are counted in the Performance report along with regular web results. They are not separated out. So you will not see a line called "AI" in Search Console. You will see the effect inside your overall impressions and clicks.

Other engines, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, are not in Search Console at all. To know whether they cite you, you have to ask them your customers' questions and record the answers, more than once, because the answers change from run to run.

A routine that takes ten minutes a month

1. Open Performance, set the date range to the last 28 days and compare it with the previous period.
2. Check total clicks and impressions. Note them somewhere you will find next month.
3. Run your question filter. Write down any new question with real impressions.
4. Check your striking-distance pages. Pick one to improve this month.
5. After you publish or update a page, use URL Inspection and request indexing. Google says a crawl can take from a few days to a few weeks, so check again next month, not tomorrow.

Three common mistakes when reading the report

Comparing single days. People search differently on a Saturday than on a Tuesday, and holidays move everything. Compare 28 days with 28 days, and with the same period last year when you have the data.

Reading the site-wide average position as a score. The average position at the top of the report mixes every query together. When your site starts appearing for many new phrases, even low down, the average looks worse, although that is exactly what early growth looks like. Read position per query and per page, not for the whole site.

Panicking when impressions rise and clicks do not. Often that is good news: Google has started showing you for more questions, just not yet in positions that get clicked. It is also the moment to check whether the answer at the top of the page is direct enough, and whether the title Google shows actually answers what people asked.

Turning the list into pages

A list of questions is a content plan you did not have to invent. Each strong question becomes one page: the answer in the first lines, details after, sources and a date, and a photo of your real product or work. Our guide to organic growth for small businesses explains the whole loop.

If you would rather see where you stand first, the free OrganicGrow scan reads your public site, with a free sign-up and no card. OrganicGrow uses Search Console the same way this guide does: it reads the questions, drafts the answer pages, and waits for your approval before anything goes live. The plans are on the pricing page.

Sources

• Search Console Help: add a website property (Domain and URL-prefix), checked October 30, 2026
• Search Console Help: managing owners, users and permissions, checked October 30, 2026
• Search Console Help: Performance report and fresh data, checked October 30, 2026
• Google Search Central: AI features and your website, checked October 30, 2026
• Google Search Central: ask Google to recrawl your URLs, checked October 30, 2026
• Ahrefs: long-tail keywords, checked October 30, 2026
• Backlinko: Google organic click-through rate statistics, checked October 30, 2026