Data and metrics
How to use the Google Search Console Performance report
The report shows clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for your property, grouped by query, page, country, device, search appearance or date. Most surprises come from how the numbers are aggregated, filtered and cut.
Checked against Google Search Console Help · October 2026
Short answer
Open the Performance report, pick the metrics, a dimension tab and a date range (the default is the last three months), add filters, compare two groups if needed and read the chart and the table as different aggregations. Search Console keeps 16 months of data, and the newest days can be preliminary.
Google describes every control on the Performance report overview page ↗ .
The steps, in order
Each step follows Google’s help pages.
Choose metrics and a dimension
Metrics are clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. Dimensions group the table by Queries, Pages, Countries, Devices, Search appearance or Dates. The default view covers the last three months.
Set the search type and dates
Search type can be web (text or multimodal), image, video or news. The 24-hour view is hourly and includes preliminary data; weekly or monthly granularity smooths daily swings.
Filter
Filter by several dimensions at once. “Queries containing” and “URLs containing” take one substring and ignore case; for several values or exclusions use Custom (regex).
Compare two groups
Compare two values of one dimension, such as two countries or two periods. Only one comparison works at a time. For dates, use weekly or monthly granularity so a Monday is not set against a Saturday.
Read the chart and the table apart
The chart is aggregated by property. The table is aggregated by property for queries, countries, devices and dates, and by page for pages and search appearance, so their totals can differ.
Export when you need more
The interface exports to Google Sheets, Excel or CSV but truncates to 1,000 rows. The API returns up to 50K rows per day per search type per property, and bulk export to BigQuery removes that ceiling.
Questions people ask most
Aggregation differs, the table shows at most 1,000 rows, and anonymized (rare) queries are left out of the table but kept in the chart totals unless you filter by query.
Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months. Save an export or use the API to keep more.
The newest data can be preliminary and may change within hours. The report shows complete days by default and a last updated date; daily data are in Pacific Time.
Search Console uses RE2, which does not support lookahead such as (?!...). To exclude something, choose Doesn’t match regex. Matching is partial and case-insensitive unless you add (?-i).
It appears only after the property reaches a minimum number of Discover impressions. Rows below the threshold are hidden but still counted in the totals.
Yes, with care: the queries are real, but rare queries are anonymized and omitted from the table, and a query you see may not show your site if you search it yourself, because results depend on time, place, device and history.
PERFORMANCE
The chart and table are two different counts
Take one user who sees three pages of your site for a query and clicks all three. Aggregated by property that is one impression, one click and position 1, so CTR is 100 percent. Aggregated by page it is one impression for each URL, a click on each, positions 1, 2 and 3 and a CTR of 33 percent per URL. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions.
Looker Studio, the API and SEOKit
The Looker Studio Search Console connector offers Site Impression (aggregated by property) and URL Impression (aggregated by page), and one data source can use only one, so build two to see both. SEOKit’s default filters use the same RE2 syntax, and its export tool goes beyond the 1,000-row interface limit through the API.
Common mistakes
Do not compare a Monday with a Saturday day by day
Switch to weekly or monthly granularity, or match weekdays.
Do not copy a lookahead regex from the internet
RE2 rejects it; use the exclusion option.
Do not treat the table total as the property total
Pages and queries are aggregated differently from the chart.
Official sources
- Search Console help: Performance report overview
- Search Console help: About the data
- Search Console help: advanced filtering and comparison
- Search Console help: data discrepancies
- Search Console help: export data from a report
- Search Console help: Discover performance report
- Looker Studio help: connect to Search Console
- RE2 syntax
- Analytics help: Google organic search traffic report