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Google Search Console connector

The Google Search Console connector is the most important connector in VisibilityIQ. It provides authoritative data on how Google actually sees your site: which pages are indexed, which canonical Google selected, what queries drive traffic, and what your real click-through rates are. Crawler findings tell you what your site says about itself; GSC tells you what Google decided — and the gap between the two is where the highest-value findings live.

What you’ll need

Section titled “What you’ll need”
  • A Google account with Owner or Full User access to the GSC property (Restricted User is not enough — it blocks the search analytics API).
  • The GSC property that matches your project’s canonical domain. If you have both a www and non-www property, connect the one your canonical points to.
  • A minute to click Sign in with Google and pick the property. There’s no Google Cloud setup — no project to create, no API to enable, no credentials to paste.

OAuth and scopes

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Connecting is one-click “Sign in with Google.” VisibilityIQ owns and operates the Google OAuth application, so you don’t bring your own Google Cloud OAuth app, create credentials, or enter a Client ID or Client Secret — you sign in, approve read-only access, and pick your property. See Connect Google Search Console for the full walkthrough.

The connector requests the minimum read-only scope (webmasters.readonly) needed to pull search analytics, sitemaps, and URL inspection data. Tokens are stored encrypted and refreshed transparently — they are never logged or exposed in API responses. When a token expires or you revoke access, the connector surfaces an Error status rather than failing silently. You can revoke at any time from Settings → Connectors or from your Google Account → Security → Third-party access.

What’s pulled

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  • Search analytics — queries, pages, clicks, impressions, average position, and CTR, daily, segmented by device (desktop, mobile, tablet). The first sync pulls up to 16 months of history where available.
  • Selected canonical — the canonical URL Google actually chose for each page via URL Inspection. This is the field that powers reconciliation findings (below).
  • Index coverage — indexed vs. not-indexed URL counts and error categories (not found, redirect error, crawl anomaly, excluded by noindex, duplicate without user-selected canonical, and others).
  • Sitemaps — every sitemap submitted in GSC, its discovered/indexed counts, and last crawl date.

Data syncs daily and is normalized into VisibilityIQ’s internal observation models — IndexationObservation, CanonicalObservation, and TrafficObservation — so scoring and UI never touch the raw GSC schema.

What it reconciles

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GSC turns crawler findings into reconciled truth in three ways:

Selected vs. declared canonical — Your page declares canonical URL A. GSC reports Google selected URL B. That override is a distinct, source-reconciled finding that only appears when GSC is connected — the crawler alone cannot see Google’s decision.

Discoverable but not indexed — A page returns 200, has no noindex, and is internally linked, yet GSC reports it excluded from the index. VisibilityIQ pairs the crawl evidence with the GSC coverage reason to explain why.

Traffic weighting — Clicks and impressions from GSC let the engine prioritize a finding on a page that earns 5,000 visits a month over the same defect on a zero-traffic page.

Data lag

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GSC data carries a 2–3 day processing lag. The most recent 2–3 days will be incomplete or absent in VisibilityIQ. This is a Google limitation, not a sync failure.

Reconnect after auth expiry

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Google OAuth tokens expire or can be revoked. If the connector shows Error or Disconnected:

  1. Go to Settings → Connectors.
  2. Click Disconnect next to Google Search Console.
  3. Click Connect and re-authorise.

You don’t lose historical data when reconnecting — VisibilityIQ keeps everything already synced.

Next steps

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