Add and verify your website in Google Search Console

Adding your site to Google Search Console is the first step that unlocks everything else. Without it, you won't know how Google sees your site, which keywords are driving impressions, or whether indexing problems are preventing your pages from appearing in search results.

Go to search.google.com/search-console, click "Add property," and choose between two property types: domain property (covers all protocols and subdomains: http, https, www, non-www) or URL prefix (a specific URL like https://www.yourdomain.com/). For most Webflow sites, set up a domain property — it consolidates data from all URL variants into one view.

Verification for a domain property: you'll need to add a DNS TXT record at your domain registrar. Log into the service where you bought your domain, find DNS settings, and add the TXT record Google provides. It looks like: google-site-verification=XXXXX. Propagation typically takes a few minutes but can take up to 24 hours.

For a URL prefix property, verification can be done via an HTML tag in your page head. In Webflow, this is the easiest method: go to Site Settings → Custom Code → paste the tag in the head code, publish the site, then verify in GSC. If you already have Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager installed, those can also be used for verification.

Once verified, submit your sitemap. In Webflow, it's automatically generated at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Submit this URL under Sitemaps in GSC. This tells Google the full list of pages you want crawled and indexed.

After submission, expect 2–4 weeks before meaningful data appears. GSC needs a critical mass of search activity to populate reports. The Coverage report starts showing indexed vs. non-indexed pages within a few days. Keyword data in the Performance report takes longer.

One clarification worth making: setting up GSC does not directly improve your rankings. It's a measurement tool. What it does is give you the data to make better optimization decisions. Without it, you're optimizing without any feedback from Google.

If your site is already live and you haven't set this up, do it now. Every week you're not in GSC is a week of baseline data you can't get back.