Google Search Console: Google’s free service for site owners. It reports the searches a site appears for, its clicks and impressions, indexing problems and the links Google has found.
Setting it up on WordPress
Add your site as a property. A Domain property must be verified with a DNS record and covers every subdomain and both http and https, so it is the better choice if you can edit DNS. A URL-prefix property can instead be verified with an HTML tag in your site’s head. Then submit your XML sitemap under Indexing › Sitemaps. If you want the headline numbers inside WordPress too, Google’s Site Kit plugin shows Search Console data on the dashboard.
The reports that matter for internal linking
- Performance: clicks, impressions, CTR and average position, grouped by query or by page. Filter to one query and switch to the Pages tab to spot keyword cannibalization.
- Page indexing: which pages are indexed and why others aren’t, with statuses such as “Discovered – currently not indexed” and “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user”.
- URL Inspection: for one URL, the page Google may have used to discover it, the sitemaps that list it, and the canonical Google chose.
- Links: top internally linked pages. Useful for a quick look, but tables stop at 1,000 rows and the data is a sample.
What it can’t tell you
Search Console shows what Google did, not what your site contains. It won’t list everyinternal link, it doesn’t report click depth, and the Links report omits pages that aren’t indexed, so it is a poor tool for finding orphan pages. Pair it with a crawl of your own site. The competing-posts guide shows how to read its query data, and the internal link audit checklist shows where it fits in a full audit.