Search Console

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How does Google know about us?

Someone types "space shooter game" into Google. Will our website show up?

Google sends programs called crawlers to visit websites and read them. Then it stores the pages in a giant library called the index. Only pages in the index can appear in search results. This takes time: a brand new site can wait days or weeks before it shows up.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool for website owners. It shows whether Google has found our pages, any problems it ran into, and how people find us in search.

First we have to prove the website is really ours. That's called verifying the site. Our domain was bought and is paid for by a parent, so a parent owns the login and gives the team access to the reports.

Proving it's ours

One way to verify: Search Console gives us a secret code. We add it to our domain's settings in Cloudflare as a DNS record (a small line of text in the domain's settings, here a TXT record).

Only the real owner can change those settings. So when Google finds the code there, it knows the site belongs to us. We leave the record in place, because Google checks again from time to time.

Quick check

Why does adding Google's code to our DNS settings prove we own the website?

  1. Only the owner can change the domain's DNS settings
  2. Google trusts anyone who asks nicely
  3. DNS records make the website load faster
Show the answer

Only the owner can change the domain's DNS settings

Nobody else can edit our domain's DNS settings. If the code shows up there, it must have been put there by the owner.

A map for the crawler

A sitemap is a file, usually called sitemap.xml, that lists the pages we want Google to find: the home page, the Hyper Shards page, the Garden Defense page and the press kit.

We submit it in Search Console. Then the Page indexing report (called Pages in the menu) shows which pages are indexed, which aren't, and why. The URL Inspection tool checks one page at a time and can ask Google to crawl it again.

Quick check

A page that Google hasn't indexed can still show up in Google search results.

Show the answer

False

Google can only show pages that are in its index. That's why we submit a sitemap and check the Page indexing report.

Four numbers to know

Read the numbers

search-console-report.txt
Page              Impressions   Clicks/hyper-shards           4,000       80/garden-defense         2,000      100

Remy exports last month's Search Console report. Which page has the higher click-through rate, and what is it?

  1. Hyper Shards, 2%
  2. Garden Defense, 5%
  3. Hyper Shards, 80%
  4. Garden Defense, 20%
Show the answer

Garden Defense, 5%

CTR is clicks divided by impressions. Garden Defense: 100 / 2,000 = 5%. Hyper Shards: 80 / 4,000 = 2%. Hyper Shards shows up more often, but people click Garden Defense more.

Our snippet in the results

Each search result shows a blue title and a short description, called a snippet. Google often takes them from two parts of the page's HTML: the title tag, like

<title>Hyper Shards: Space Shooter</title>

and the meta description, one or two sentences about the page. A clear, honest title and description make people want to click, which raises our CTR. Google may show other text from the page instead, especially if ours doesn't match the page.

What did people search?

Search Console also lists the queries: the exact words people searched before they saw our site.

Maybe lots of people find us with "garden pest game", words we never even used. Then we add those words to our pages and to our store keywords, so even more players find us. A low CTR is a clue too: our title or meta description may need to be clearer.

Bolt says: Store pages, trailers, festivals, Discord, short videos, creators and search: that's how players find us. In Stage 9, we learn how to keep them coming back.

Fact-checked 9 October 2026