New URL inspection tool and more in Search Console

Monday, June 25, 2018

A few months ago, we introduced the
new Search Console. Here are
some updates on how it’s progressing.

Welcome “URL inspection” tool

One of our most common user requests in Search Console is for more details on how Google Search
sees a specific URL. We listened, and today we’ve started launching a new tool,
URL inspection,
to provide these details so Search becomes more transparent. The URL Inspection tool provides
detailed
crawl, index, and serving information
about your pages, directly from the Google index.

Enter a URL that you own to learn the last crawl date and status, any crawling or indexing errors,
and the canonical URL for that page. If the page was successfully indexed, you can see information
and status about any enhancements we found on the page, such as linked AMP version or rich results
like Recipes and Jobs.

If a page isn’t indexed, you can learn why. The new report includes information about
noindex robots meta tags and Google’s
canonical URL for the page.

A single click can take you to the issue report showing all other pages affected by the same issue
to help you track down and fix common bugs.

We hope that the URL Inspection tool will help you debug issues with new or existing pages in the
Google index. We began rolling it out today; it will become available to all users in the coming
weeks.

More exciting updates

In addition to the launch of URL inspection, we have a few more features and reports we recently
launched to the new Search Console:

• 16 months of traffic data: The
  Search Analytics API
  now returns 16 months of data, just like the
  Performance report.
• Recipe report: The
  Recipe report
  help you fix structured data issues affecting recipes rich results. Use our
  task-oriented interface to
  test and validate your fixes; we will keep you informed on your progress using messages.
• New Search Appearance filters in Search Analytics: The
  performance
  report now gives you more visibility on new search appearance results, including
  Web Light
  and
  Google Play Instant
  results.

Thank you for your feedback

We are constantly reading your feedback, conducting surveys, and monitoring usage statistics of
the new Search Console. We are happy to see so many of you using the new
issue validation flow
in Index Coverage and the AMP report. We notice that issues tend to get fixed quicker when you use
these tools. We also see that you appreciate the updates on the validation process that we provide
by email or on the validation details page.

We want to thank everyone who provided feedback: it has helped us improve our flows and fix bugs
on our side.

More to come

The new Search Console is still beta, but it’s adding features and reports every month. Please
keep sharing your feedback through the various channels and let us know how we’re doing.

Posted by Roman Kecher and Sion Schori – Search Console engineers