Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google that gives site owners visibility into how their site performs on Google search. It reports:
- Every query users typed that resulted in your site appearing
- How many times each query showed your site (impressions)
- How many times users clicked through (clicks)
- The average position your site held for each query
Why BCited uses it
We pull 90 days of query-level data from GSC for every project. That data is the foundation for:
- Topical clustering — we cluster the queries you actually rank for, not a guess at what you might
- Quick wins — we find queries ranking 5–20 with non-trivial impressions
- Ownership status — we classify each cluster based on the ranking shape of its queries
- Authority scores — we score each cluster from real ranking data
The read-only webmasters.readonly OAuth scope is enough. We never modify your GSC properties, just read them.
What GSC doesn't tell you
GSC reports on Google. It says nothing about how often AI answer engines cite you, what your share-of-voice is in ChatGPT or Claude, or how competitive your position is in Perplexity's source rankings. That's what AEO tracking is for.