Connecting Google Search Console

What it does

Connect a project to Google Search Console and Asheard reads your own Google Search data once a day, read-only: clicks, impressions, CTR and position by search, page, day, device and country. It costs no credits.

• Clicks and CTR next to your tracked positions in the keyword table: the last 28 days, all devices, in each keyword's country. Hover the clicks for desktop and mobile.
• CTR with and without an AI Overview: for each tracked keyword and device, the CTR on days its search showed an AI Overview against the days it didn't, from your rank checks. It shows how many clicks AI Overviews keep on Google for your keywords.
• Searches that bring clicks but aren't tracked: pick them and track them in one click, in the country they come from, on the domain and in the language you choose. Your plan's keyword limit applies.
• Questions people search that could be prompts: the longer and question-shaped searches that bring up your site, to track as AI visibility prompts in one click.
• Your pages in search and in AI answers: your top pages by clicks next to how often the AI answers we track cite and read them, and their impressions in Google's AI features when you import Google's AI report on the Google & Bing page. Pages that get clicks but no citations link to the page audit.

Connecting

Open Search Console in the project's menu and click Connect Search Console. Sign in with a Google account that has access to your site in Search Console, and allow access; if Google shows a box for Search Console, keep it ticked. Then choose the property to use. When one property clearly matches the project's domain, it's chosen for you. A domain property (example.com) covers the domain and all its subdomains; a URL-prefix property covers its own address.

Managers and admins connect, choose the property and disconnect. Everyone who can see the project can see the page.

What Asheard reads and keeps

Asheard asks Google for read-only access to your Search Console data and for your Google account's e-mail address, which the page shows so you know which account is connected. It can't change anything in Search Console. The access tokens are stored encrypted.

It keeps: the daily totals by device, for up to 16 months; for your tracked keywords, their daily clicks and impressions for up to 120 days, in each keyword's country; and for the latest 28 days, the top searches by country, the top pages and the clicks by country. The data is only used to show it to you in this project. It isn't shared, sold or used for anything else.

When you track one of these searches as a keyword or a prompt, it becomes one of your keywords or prompts and is checked like any other: its text goes to the rank checks or to the AI engines you track. Nothing else from Search Console leaves Asheard.

Asheard's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Disconnecting

Disconnect on the Search Console page removes the connection and deletes everything read from Search Console for the project. To remove Asheard from your Google account as well, use the third-party connections in your Google Account settings. When the same Google account is connected to other projects, they keep working until you disconnect them too.

Good to know

• Search Console data arrives two to three days late. The page shows the date it runs through.
• Google leaves out searches too rare to show without identifying someone, so the searches listed add up to less than the totals.
• One property per project. Keywords on domains outside that property get no clicks and CTR.
• The AI Overview comparison needs keywords whose checks record AI Overviews, with enough impressions both on days with one and on days without. Until then the card says what's missing.
• If Google stops accepting the connection (access was removed in the Google account, or it expired after six months unused), the page asks you to connect again. Nothing is lost.