Google Webmaster Tools has been called Google Search Console since 20 May 2015. Nothing was taken away in the rename and nothing has to be migrated: the same verification, the same index and traffic reports, the same free account. If you are looking for Webmaster Tools, you are looking for Search Console.
What follows maps every old name to the current one, says what each tool in Search Console actually answers, and states the documented limits that decide which questions the reports can answer at all. That last part is where most guides stop and where the work starts.
What happened to Google Webmaster Tools
Two renames are regularly confused into one.
May 2015 — the product. In Announcing Google Search Console, dated Wednesday 20 May 2015, Google wrote that it had spent a year learning who actually used the product and found that "the traditional idea of the 'webmaster' reflects only some of you" — the users were hobbyists, small business owners, SEO experts, marketers, programmers, designers and app developers. The stated conclusion was to rebrand Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console. The tool did not change that day. Its name did.
November 2020 — the brand around it. On 11 November 2020 Google retired the word "webmaster" from the surrounding brand. Google Webmaster Central became Google Search Central, the help forum became the Google Search Central Community, and the documentation moved onto one site. The reason given: the term dates back to 1993, and Google's own research found that only a small share of web professionals call themselves webmasters, while the rest say SEO, online marketer, blogger, web developer or site owner. Search Console kept the name it got in 2015.
So "Google Webmaster Tools" is not a product you are missing, and "Google Search Central" is not a replacement for Search Console: one is the documentation, the other is the reporting tool. Search Console is free for anyone who can verify a site.
Old name, current name, and the question it answers
| What you remember | What it is called now | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Google Webmaster Tools | Google Search Console | Everything in the rows below |
| Search Queries, Search Analytics | Performance report | Which queries and pages earn impressions, clicks, CTR and position |
| Fetch as Google | URL Inspection tool | What Google has indexed for one URL, and whether it could be indexed |
| Index Status, Crawl Errors | Page indexing report | Which pages are indexed, which are not, and the reason given |
| Sitemaps | Sitemaps report | Which sitemaps Google read, when, and what it found |
| Links to Your Site | Links report | Which sites and pages link to you |
| Structured Data Testing Tool | Rich Results Test | Whether a page qualifies for a rich result |
| Google Webmaster Central | Google Search Central | Documentation and the Search blog |
The tools inside Search Console and the job each one does
Performance report. Clicks, impressions, CTR and average position by query, page, country, device and search appearance. One definition decides how you read it: average position is "the average position of the topmost result from your site", averaged across impressions. It is not the position of the URL you had in mind, and it is not what a single person saw.
URL Inspection tool. Per Google, it "provides information about Google's indexed version of a specific page, and also allows you to test whether a URL might be indexable". Use it to answer one question about one URL — is this page in, and if not, what does Google say about it.
Page indexing report. The site-wide version of the same question: how many URLs are indexed, how many are not, and which documented reason each group was given. This is the report to open before rewriting anything, because a page Google never fetched cannot be fixed with better copy.
Sitemaps report. Whether Google read the file, when it last did, and how many URLs it found there. A submitted sitemap is a hint about which pages exist, not an instruction to index them.
Removals tool. The most misread tool in the set. It temporarily blocks pages from Google Search results, and a successful request "lasts only about six months". It removes content from Google Search, not from the internet, and using it alone will not remove a URL permanently.
Links report. The sites and pages Google sees linking to you, plus your most linked pages. Useful as a picture of what the web says about the site; not a complete backlink index.
Disavow links tool. Still separate, still a last resort. Google's own wording: "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site's performance in Google Search results", and "most sites will not need to use this tool". The documented case for using it is a considerable number of spammy or artificial links that have caused a manual action, or likely will.
Security and manual actions. The security issues report and the manual actions report are the two places where a human decision or a hack shows up. Both are empty for most sites, and both are worth checking first when traffic falls off a cliff rather than drifts.
Rich Results Test. The tool people search for as the "Google Search Console testing tool" lives outside the console itself: the Rich Results Test checks whether a page qualifies for a rich result and what Google parsed from its structured data.
What Search Console will not tell you
The reports are a source of truth about Google, not about your business, and they have documented edges. Four of them decide most of what you can do.
- Row limits. The Search Analytics API returns 1,000 rows by default and accepts a valid range of 1 to 25,000 per request, paged with an offset. Sites with a long tail run into this before they run into anything else.
- Sixteen months. Google's own guide to debugging search traffic drops tells you to set the date filter to the last 16 months "to make sure it's not a drop that happens every year due to a festivity or a trend". That is also the ceiling: year-on-year comparison works, three-year trends do not.
- Inspection quota. The URL Inspection API is capped at 2,000 queries per day and 600 per minute per site. Inspecting a large site URL by URL is not a plan.
- The data can be wrong before you are. Before blaming a change on your own site, Google's drop guide says to check the Search Console data anomalies page — a drop may be a logging or processing issue on Google's side.
And one thing no report contains: money. Search Console counts clicks; whether those clicks became enquiries is a question for analytics, which is why the two sources disagree so often — the difference between Search Console and GA4 is a definition problem, not a bug.
From report to task
A tool is worth its interface only if a report turns into a decision. The four questions below are the ones the Performance report is actually good at, once you stop reading it as a scoreboard.
- Which pages lose clicks they have already earned? Impressions hold, clicks fall: a snippet problem, not a ranking problem. CTR Lens compares two periods and Lost Clicks measures the gap between actual CTR and what the position normally earns. What "normal" means is its own argument — see organic CTR by position.
- Which pages are one step from the top? Positions 4 to 10 already have Google's agreement that the page is relevant. Ranking Opportunities sorts them by what a move would be worth.
- Which pages compete with each other? When several URLs take turns ranking for one query, the fix is consolidation, not more content. Keyword Cannibalization finds them in your own data.
- What is actually growing? Brand demand rises with advertising and PR, so leaving it in the same chart flatters or hides everything else. Brand vs Non-Brand splits them, and Wins and Losses names the pages and queries behind a change.
When the 1,000-row ceiling is the thing in your way, GSC Export pulls a wider extract through the API, and Indexing Cleanup works through the indexing side. The full set is on the Google Search Console tools page, and the reasoning behind the reports is covered in the free lesson on Google Search Console.
Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are not the same thing
The phrase "webmaster tools" survives at Microsoft: Bing Webmaster Tools is a separate product for a separate search engine, with its own verification and its own index. It is not an alternative source of Google data and it will not match Search Console, because the two describe different result pages. Verify both if Bing sends you traffic worth the effort; read them separately.