How to set up Google Search Console

Add your site to Search Console as a domain property, verify it with a DNS record, submit your sitemap, and add it to Bing in the same sitting.

By SupaVisible Editorial28 September 2026Lesson 4 of 92 min read

In this lesson

Use a domain property, verified with a DNS record.
Submit your sitemap, but expect Google to decide page by page.
Add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools in the same sitting.

To set up Google Search Console, add your site as a domain property, prove you own the domain by adding a DNS record, then submit your sitemap. It takes about fifteen minutes, most of it waiting for the DNS record to take effect.

Which type of property should you choose?

Search Console offers two, described in Google's help on adding a property:

	Domain property	URL-prefix property
Covers	Every subdomain (`www`, `app` and so on), on `http` and `https`	Only addresses starting with the exact prefix you type, such as `https://www.example.com/`
Verified by	A DNS record, nothing else	Several methods
Choose it when	You can edit your domain's DNS	You cannot

Choose a domain property if you can edit your domain's DNS. Otherwise, traffic to example.com and www.example.com can land in different properties, and you only see half the picture.

How do you verify it?

Open Search Console and choose Add property.
Pick Domain and type your domain without https:// or www.
Copy the TXT record Search Console gives you.
In a new tab, open wherever your domain's DNS is managed (your registrar, or a service such as Cloudflare) and add a TXT record with that value on the root of the domain.
Go back to Search Console and choose Verify. If it fails, wait an hour and try again: DNS changes can take a while to spread.

How do you submit your sitemap?

A sitemap is the file that lists your pages. Most site builders and frameworks create one at /sitemap.xml.

Open yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml in a browser and check it loads.
In Search Console, open Sitemaps.
Paste the sitemap's address into Add a new sitemap and submit it.

Google fetches the sitemap straight away, but its help page is clear that a page listed in a sitemap is not guaranteed to be crawled or indexed. It tells Google where to look, and Google still decides page by page.

Should you add Bing at the same time?

Yes, and it takes two minutes. Bing Webmaster Tools can import a site straight from Search Console, with its sitemaps, and treats it as verified. Bing is a search engine in its own right, and ChatGPT search leans on it: a Seer Interactive study found 87% of ChatGPT search's citations matched Bing's top results (reported).

What happens next?

Google says data can take up to a week to appear for a newly added site. While you wait, check that your key pages are on Google, and read what the numbers will mean when they arrive.

Quick answers

Should I use a domain property or a URL-prefix property?: A domain property if you can edit your domain's DNS settings. It covers every version of your site, with and without www and on http and https, in one place. A URL-prefix property covers only addresses that start with the exact prefix you enter, so you can miss data.
How long does Search Console take to show data?: Google says it can take up to a week to show data for a site newly added to Search Console. A site Google has only just found may show very few searches for longer, because it has not been shown for many yet.

Check what you learned

Question 1 of 3

Which property type covers www and non-www, on both http and https?

Find the searches your own site almost ranks for.

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