Google Search Console

Search Console is what Google saw people search for your site: the queries, how often, at what position, and how often searchers opened the page. Connecting it does four things:

• Your topics. Real searches from buyers shape your topics and join the ones they fit, as questions the poll asks the answer engines. Only buyer, problem and brand searches qualify; support lookups, article readers, tools and your own checks never do. Each such question is private to your workspace: its answers are never shared with another workspace. See Which questions count.
• Verification. The connection can verify the site at once, so the audit starts without waiting for a DNS change.
• The site audit. Every sampled page carries its clicks, impressions and position, and the audit can flag pages Google shows often and searchers rarely open.
• The AI report. Google’s generative-AI impressions, uploaded, become an outcome on Results and help calibrate AI demand.

Connect

On the site’s Setup, Connect Search Console sends you to Google. Sign in with an account that can read the property (owner, full or restricted user), allow read-only access, and you come back with the property chosen for you: the domain property when there is one, else the URL-prefix property that matches the host, else a parent domain property. When none of the account’s properties matches the host, Setup lists them and you choose; Change property does the same later. The first sync runs at once, and Sync now runs one on demand.

Before you connect, the privacy policy says exactly where the data goes: the language model that builds your topics, the answer engines that are asked your buyer, problem and brand searches, a keyword-data provider for their search volumes, and the run’s analysis of your pages. It is never sold, used for advertising, shared with another workspace or used by Vercatus to train a model.

One Google account can hold many properties; each site in Vercatus reads only the one chosen for it. A parent domain property is filtered to the site’s own host, and a property that cannot cover the host is refused.

Verifying the site

When the connected account is an owner or full user of the site’s Domain property, or of the URL-prefix property for exactly its address, the site is verified as soon as it connects. Vercatus looks at every property the account can see for this, not only the one chosen for data. The verification holds while the access does: every sync checks it again, and losing that access or disconnecting ends it. The DNS record confirms full ownership for good; Verify a domain has both.

Which searches join your topics

Each synced search is sorted by who is asking, from its words, the pages it landed on and what the site offers. Buyer, problem and brand searches may join a topic, the ones people see most first, and Search Console’s share of a site’s questions is capped, so a large search footprint does not crowd out the phrasings that stand for the whole market. Searches join when topics are built or rebuilt; a topic’s page shows each one with its origin and its class. Which questions count has the classes.

What is synced

The last 28 complete days, ending three days ago because Google finalises data with a lag: the top 500 queries, the top pages (up to 2,000), and the top 1,000 query-and-page pairs, each with clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. Replaced on every sync; only the latest window is kept.

The AI report

Google’s Search Console has a separate generative-AI performance report: impressions of your links inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report: citations in Copilot and its AI summaries. Neither can be fetched automatically, so you download the file and upload it under the site’s Setup, AI search reports.

1. In Search Console, open the generative-AI performance report and export it. In Bing Webmaster Tools, open AI Performance and export it.
2. Choose the report (Google or Bing) and the CSV file, or paste its text, and press Upload report.
3. The page says what it read: the kind of table (daily totals, by page, by country, by device, by query), the dates it covers and the number of rows.

Upload the daily totals table first: it is the one the counts come from. The other tables add the pages and queries shown beside them. A table with no date column asks for the first and last day of the export.

Uploading again is safe: rows for the same report, table and dates are replaced, so a corrected or longer export takes over instead of doubling. Rows are kept for 13 months. A file can hold up to 50,000 rows and 5 MB. Analysts, admins and owners can upload, and each upload is in the audit log. A file that cannot be read stores nothing, and the page lists what is wrong.

Where it appears:

• Results: Google’s AI impressions, then against now, as an outcome. See Results.
• AI demand: Google’s AI impressions and Bing’s AI citations calibrate the demand model across sites, as ratios only. See Vercatus Intelligence.

Impressions are not citations, and neither is a count of how often anyone asked. Do not divide ordinary Web clicks by AI-report impressions; the AI Overviews measurement guide explains why.

Access and removal

Vercatus asks for the read-only Search Console scope and your email address, nothing else. The refresh token is encrypted at rest and never shown. Disconnect (admins) deletes, at once: the token, the synced rows, the daily branded-search figures, Google’s index status of your pages, the questions taken from your searches with every answer to them, the tracked and run questions taken from them, the search figures on your pages in past runs, and the demand estimates that used them. It also ends a verification that rested on the connection. What a model already wrote from that data, and reports and emails already sent, keep what they said; the privacy policy has the full list.