Operations · document 13

Search Operations

In the workspace: /webmaster-tools

Availability

Included on Advanced

This document is open to every reader on every plan. Availability tells you what a plan includes; it does not decide what you may read.

What it is for

Everything else in this platform examines your site from the outside. This section reads what the search engines themselves hold on file for it: what Google, Bing and Yandex have recorded, which sitemaps they know about, and how each of them describes your visibility. It is one screen for four provider accounts, so a question about your site does not become four sign-ins.

How to use it

Connect the providers you use, in Integrations. Nothing on this page has data before that: it reads their accounts, it does not crawl your site.
Select the project. Every panel on the page follows that selection, so the four providers always describe one site.
Choose the provider tab you need. They are separate on purpose - the tabs are not four views of one dataset, they are four different datasets.
Read the window each provider states before you compare figures across them.

Reading the result

Each provider keeps its own window, its own scope and its own definition of position, and this page preserves all three rather than averaging them into one number. Google reports the range you asked for; Bing chooses its own window and accepts no request; Yandex returns a ranked sample rather than whole-site totals. That is why a click count from one provider is not comparable to a click count from another, and why no combined score is offered anywhere on the page.

What it cannot tell you

It reports what each provider chose to disclose, which is not the same as what happened. Providers omit low-volume and privacy-filtered rows, they revise figures for days after the fact, and a provider you have not connected is simply absent rather than empty. This page also cannot change anything at a provider: submitting and removing are separate, deliberate actions on their own pages.

What it keeps

Nothing of the provider data. What is retained is the connection itself and the record of any operation you ran, so an action taken on your behalf is always attributable. The figures are read live on each visit, because a cached figure from a provider that revises its own numbers would be worse than no figure.