Check your Google Search traffic for free

Where real traffic numbers come from

Search Console measures clicks from Google Search results. Web analytics measures site visits or sessions across channels such as direct, referral, email and search. They answer different questions, so do not present Search Console clicks as total visitors. Third-party tools can estimate another site's traffic, but cannot read its private visitor count.

Shipwork reads your own Search Console property with read-only access. It shows the search clicks and impressions tied to your pages, then helps you decide which already-visible pages to inspect. For all-channel sessions, use your site's analytics.

Connect Search Console

The connection is a standard Google OAuth grant with read-only scope: no script on your site, no change to your theme, nothing to install. Once connected, Shipwork reads your clicks, impressions, average position and the queries behind them, and joins them to the pages they land on. You can disconnect at any time from the same page, and it revokes the access.

What you can check for free

• Search traffic at risk: pages ranked by the Google Search clicks each already earns, alongside the issues found on them.
• Your trend: whether clicks and impressions are rising or falling over the window, so you notice a slide before it becomes a cliff.
• Striking distance: the queries you rank for at positions 5 to 20, which are the cheapest wins you have.
• Content gaps and cannibalization: the pages that compete with each other, or miss the query they should own.

Reading the numbers honestly

Read clicks and impressions together: impressions show appearances in results and clicks show visits from those results. Treat position as an average across searches, not a fixed rank. Compare a 28-day window with the previous 28 days rather than reacting to one hour. Recent Search Console data can be preliminary and may change as Google finishes processing it.

When the numbers look missing

A new property shows little or nothing for the first weeks: Google has to collect data before there is a trend to read. Pages with no impressions are not necessarily broken; they may simply have not been seen yet. If the connection succeeds but a report is empty, check the date range and the property (the prefix or domain property you connected) before assuming a fault, and use the indexation checks to confirm the pages can be found at all.

Questions

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