How to Add a Website to Google Search Console

Google Search Console is free and is how you tell Google your site exists, see which searches bring people to it, and find indexing problems. Setting it up takes ten minutes.

Sign in and add a property

Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google account. Click Add property.

You will see two options. Choose Domain and enter just the domain, like yourdomain.com. This one property covers http, https, www, and every subdomain. The URL prefix option covers only one exact version, which is rarely what you want.

Copy the DNS TXT record

Google shows a verification record that looks like:

google-site-verification=abc123...

Click Copy.

Add the record at your domain registrar

Log in wherever you bought the domain (Porkbun, Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, and so on) and open the DNS settings. Add a new record:

• Type: TXT
• Host or Name: @ (or leave blank, depending on the registrar)
• Value: the string you copied

Save it. Do not remove any existing records.

Click Verify

Back in Search Console, click Verify. DNS changes can take a few minutes to spread. If it fails, wait ten minutes and try again. Once it succeeds, the record must stay in place or verification lapses.

Submit your sitemap

In the left menu click Sitemaps, enter sitemap.xml, and click Submit. This is the single most useful thing you can do for a new site. Google now knows every page instead of having to discover them one link at a time.

Request indexing for your most important page

Paste your homepage URL into the search bar at the top of Search Console. Click Request indexing. This asks Google to crawl it soon rather than whenever it gets around to it. You can do this for a few pages a day.

What to expect. New sites usually appear in search results within a few days to two weeks. The Pages report under Indexing shows which URLs are in and which were skipped, with the reason.