Connecting Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is Google's own report of how your verified site performs in Google Search: real impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and average position, for the actual searches people used. Connecting it brings that real data into keyword tracking, next to the estimated rank and your AI visibility.

Why connect it

The Google position LumaRank shows without GSC is a solid estimate. GSC is your real number, straight from Google, for your own site. For an SEO team that lives in Search Console, that difference matters: it is your traffic, your queries, your CTR.

GSC does not replace the estimate. It only covers your own site and only the queries you already get impressions for, so the estimate still fills in competitors and keywords you do not rank for yet.

How to connect

1. Open Company settings and find the Google Search Console card under Data sources.
2. Click Connect Google Search Console. You will be sent to Google to approve read-only access. LumaRank can never change anything in your Search Console.
3. Come back and pick which verified property matches your site. LumaRank suggests the one that matches your domain automatically.

You connect one Google account per company. Make sure the account you use already has access to the property in Search Console.

Connecting is available on paid plans.

What you will see

• Keywords table: the Google column shows your real position (in blue) for keywords GSC has data for, with impressions on hover. Where there is no real data yet, it falls back to the estimate, marked "est." You never see two numbers for the same keyword.
• Keyword detail: a Google Search Console panel with real impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position for that exact query.

Some keywords show no GSC data. That is expected: Google reports the top queries for your site and the data lags two to three days, so newer or low-traffic keywords may not appear yet. They keep showing the estimate until real data arrives.

The Search Console view

Once a property is linked, each project gets a Search Console page (in the project menu, next to Keywords). It is your site-level Google picture over the time window you pick in the page header, with every number compared to the period of the same length before it:

• Traffic: total clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position, each with its change, plus day-by-day clicks and impressions charts.
• AI visibility x Google: your AI-tracked keywords plotted by Google rank against how many AI assistants cite you. It sorts them into four groups: Winning (you rank in the top 10 and AI cites you), GEO opportunity (you rank in the top 10 but the AI answers skip you), SEO opportunity (the AI answers cite you but Google ranks you low), and Low priority. Point size reflects your Google clicks. This only covers keywords you track in AI that also have Google data, so it fills in as you track more. The GEO opportunities use the same definition as the keyword opportunities, so the two always agree. The traffic numbers, the top queries, the top pages and the device and country breakdowns all follow that window. The opportunity lists below them (striking distance, CTR gaps, cannibalization, untracked queries and the AI visibility cross-plot) stay on a fixed 28 day window, because they are recommendations rather than trends and a narrow window would empty them.

Two things bound how far back you can look. Search Console keeps 90 days of history, and a newly connected property starts with a shorter backfill that grows with each daily sync. When the window you picked is longer than the history stored, the page says so rather than drawing a chart with a missing half, and period-over-period changes only appear once the earlier period is fully covered.

• Striking distance: queries where you rank just below page 1 (positions 11 to 20) and already earn impressions. A small improvement can move them onto page 1.
• CTR gaps: queries earning fewer clicks than is typical for their position, usually a sign the page title and description could be more compelling.
• Keyword cannibalization: queries where two or more of your own pages compete in Google's results. Competing pages can split your ranking signals; consider consolidating them or making each one target a distinct search.
• Untracked queries: real searches Google already shows your site for that you do not track yet. You can import them straight into your keywords: on the Keywords page, open Add keywords and choose the Search Console source. It lists the untracked searches with their clicks, impressions and average position, so you can pick by evidence rather than by guess. Filter by a minimum number of impressions, or hide the searches that contain your brand name to focus on the terms you have not won yet. Once imported, they are tracked for Google rank like any other keyword, and you can connect them to AI visibility too.
• Where your traffic comes from: device, country and search-appearance breakdowns (including Google's special results, like rich results and AI surfaces).
• Branded vs non-branded: how much of your traffic comes from people searching your name versus everything else. Non-branded is your true earned SEO. A brand-demand tile tracks how often people search for you by name, a proxy for awareness.
• Pages losing traffic: pages whose clicks dropped the most versus the previous period, so you know what to refresh. This needs about eight weeks of history to appear.
• Top queries and top pages: your best-performing searches and URLs.

Where a block does not have enough data yet, it says so instead of showing a misleading zero. New properties fill in within a day or two of connecting. The cannibalization block needs a little longer, because it collects query-and-page data from the moment you connect.

The striking-distance, CTR-gap and cannibalization insights also appear as actions in the Actions hub (under Opportunities → Search Console), where you can mark them done or dismiss them like any other action.

Choosing or changing the property

If your site uses more than one verified property, or the wrong one was picked, use Change property on the keywords page to select the right one. Each project maps to its own property. Only properties verified on the connected Google account can be chosen, so a project can never end up pointed at one that will never return data.

Reconnecting

If you remove LumaRank's access from your Google account, the card shows Reconnect needed. Click Reconnect to resume the daily refresh.

A card that still says Connected is connected: if Google is briefly unavailable we retry later rather than treating it as a disconnection, so the daily refresh resumes on its own.

Not interested for now

Search Console is optional. If you do not want it, use the X on the connect card in company settings and it stops appearing. That is remembered in the browser you dismissed it from, so it can come back on another computer. It never hides a connection you already have, and Search Console still shows up on the project's Monitoring tab as "Not set up", so you can connect it later whenever you want.

Disconnecting

Disconnect stops the daily refresh, removes LumaRank's access at Google, and deletes the Search Console data we pulled for that connection's projects. Your AI visibility scans, prompts and keywords are untouched: only the Google numbers go. If you reconnect later we start collecting again from that point, with the usual backfill.

Who can do it: connecting, changing the property, pausing the sync and disconnecting all need edit access to the company. Someone with view-only access can read the Search Console blocks but cannot change the connection.