The Case for a Free Tool
Google Search Console can do far more than show a site's clicks and impressions. The tutorial's presenter highlights query-level performance data, indexing diagnostics, Core Web Vitals and link reports, along with newer reports for generative AI performance and social traffic. His argument is that marketers who use only the headline clicks graph are missing much of the platform's value: Search Console can help diagnose why pages are not indexed, identify search opportunities and connect technical SEO problems with actual search performance.
Setup itself is a short hurdle. The presenter recommends choosing the domain property type over URL prefix, because it covers every URL on every subdomain, www or not, HTTP or HTTPS, the trade-off being DNS verification, done by pasting a Google-supplied TXT record at the domain registrar. If verification fails, he says, it is often just DNS propagation, and trying again the next day usually works.
Reading the Real Numbers
The heart of the tool is the Performance report, which answers the high-level questions in one screen: whether traffic is growing, what people actually type to find you, and which pages do the heavy lifting. The presenter suggests comparing the last three months against the previous period, and notes the date range stretches from 24 hours to 16 months, the full extent of Google's history in the tool.
The report's real power comes from filters. Filtering by a single page and turning on average position turns the chart into that page's ranking history for up to 16 months, no paid rank tracker required. The two honest caveats: average position is averaged across every impression, location, and device, so it should be treated as a trend line rather than a pinpoint rank, and low-volume keywords naturally wobble, a two-position swing on a keyword with only 40 impressions means little.
The sharpest trick is separating branded from non-branded traffic. Because branded keywords sit at position one all day and tell you almost nothing, the presenter recommends a custom regex query filter set to "doesn't match, " listing brand terms separated by pipe symbols. What remains is traffic from people who didn't know you existed until your content showed up, the number, he says, that he puts in front of clients every month and that dictates most of his content decisions.
Fixing What Google Won't Show
When a published page is nowhere to be found, the URL inspection bar reveals whether the page is indexed, when it was last crawled, and what is blocking it. Two statuses sound alike but mean different things: "discovered – currently not indexed" means Google knows the page exists and hasn't gotten around to crawling it, often helped by internal links from stronger pages; "crawled – currently not indexed" means Google read the page and passed, usually a signal the content is too thin or too similar to something else on the site.
The presenter flags a big misconception: not indexed does not equal error. Ad landing pages, thank-you and confirmation pages, internal search results, filtered category pages, and staging pages are all deliberately kept out of the index. His rule of thumb is one question, do I want people to find this content on Google? If the answer is no, the exclusions are the system working as intended.
For unexplained traffic drops, he describes sorting a comparison table by click difference in ascending order so the biggest losers float to the top. Looking for what those pages share (a topic cluster, a page type, thin content, or in one client's case cannibalization) turns guesswork into diagnosis. Sometimes, he adds, the answer is simply that the search results page changed: user intent and expectations shift over time, raising the bar for quality or demanding a different format altogether.
The AI Visibility Question
A newer and stranger problem: rankings hold steady while clicks fall. The presenter's diagnosis is that the search page itself has changed, often because Google inserted something, most likely an AI overview, that answers the question before anyone scrolls. A shrinking click-through rate at a stable position is the tell.
Until recently that could only be suspected. In June 2026, Google shipped a dedicated generative AI performance report (the first official window into AI overviews and AI mode) showing how many times a link to your site appeared inside a generative AI feature, broken down by page, country, and device. It is still in beta with no click data yet; Google says clicks and position are coming later. If pages losing clicks are pulling heavy AI impressions, the presenter's read is blunt: you're not losing rankings, you're just losing the click, which may not be bad if you're still winning the sale.
The report has honest limits the presenter is careful to name. It counts impressions only inside Google's own AI ecosystem and cannot reveal what the AI actually said (whether you were recommended or merely name-dropped next to three competitors. It says nothing about ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, or other assistants. Google has also introduced a toggle letting site owners pull content out of AI overviews without touching normal rankings, and the presenter argues this report is the data for that decision, showing exactly how much AI visibility would be given up, page by page) though he does not really recommend flipping it.
From Data to Content Plan
Search Console also functions as an idea engine. Filtering queries by a regex pattern matching question words (who, what, when, where, why, how, can, or does) returns a list of real questions where your site already appears. Where no page answers a question directly, you are ranking on the strength of a passing mention, which the presenter calls a ton of free content ideas already validated by real search data.
The same logic works at scale: export up to 1, 000 rows of queries to Google Sheets, hand the list to an AI assistant along with your sitemap, and ask where the gaps are. His own example shows how precise this can get, a blog post targeting one beeswax keyword earned about three clicks in three months, while a differently phrased keyword on the same topic earned 19. In his words, Google is telling you with your own data which keyword the page should be targeting.
Two surprises round out the picture. The links report, he says, is a shockingly robust source of backlink data (top linked pages, internal link counts, and linking sites) for free, though it lacks the competitor data and quality scores of paid tools; and since Google has made clear that internal links distribute backlink equity, high-authority pages are exactly where you add links pointing at newer pages you want to rank. For video publishers, the videos report enforces one rule: Google only indexes a video when the video is the main event of the page, a dedicated watch page, not an embed halfway down a blog post.