How I Used ChatGPT with Google Search Console to Improve My Website SEO

I have been building websites and writing content for years.

I understand the basics of SEO. I know that page titles matter, that Google needs to be able to index your website and that creating useful content around the things your potential customers search for is important.

But Google Search Console?

Until recently, I was largely in the dark.

I had Google Search Console connected to my website. I occasionally looked at it. I could see graphs, clicks, impressions, indexed pages and lots of terminology that appeared to be telling me something important.

The problem was that I didn’t really know what to do with any of it.

Then I tried something different.

Rather than attempting to become a Google Search Console expert, I used ChatGPT to help me interpret what Google was telling me.

The result was one of the most useful SEO exercises I have done on my website.

And I suspect there are a lot of other small business owners in exactly the same position.

The problem with Google Search Console isn’t the data

Google Search Console contains an enormous amount of useful information about how Google sees your website.

It can show you:

• Which pages Google has indexed
• Which pages it hasn’t indexed
• The searches that cause your website to appear
• How many times your pages appear in search results
• How many people click through
• Your average position in Google
• Which pages are gaining or losing visibility
• Potential technical and indexing problems

Google itself describes the Performance report as a way of seeing how search traffic changes over time, where that traffic comes from and which queries are most likely to show your website.

Google Search Console Performance Report

That’s incredibly useful.

But there’s a big difference between having data and understanding what the data is telling you.

That was my problem.

What started my investigation

I noticed something in Search Console that concerned me.

The number of pages from my website being indexed by Google appeared to have fallen significantly.

My immediate reaction was:

Why is Google dropping my pages?

Was something wrong with the website?

Had I accidentally changed something?

Had Google decided that my content wasn’t good enough?

Was this damaging my rankings?

Previously, I would probably have looked around Search Console, become increasingly confused by the terminology and eventually left it alone.

This time, I gave the information to ChatGPT.

Instead of asking ChatGPT for SEO advice, I gave it my actual Google data

This is the important distinction.

I didn’t simply ask:

“How can I improve my SEO?”

That would probably have produced the usual generic advice about keywords, backlinks, page titles and quality content.

Instead, I exported the actual data from Google Search Console and gave it to ChatGPT to analyse.

I also shared screenshots as we worked through the different sections.

That changed the conversation completely.

ChatGPT wasn’t trying to guess what might be wrong with my website.

It could look at the evidence.

And, crucially for me, it could explain what the information meant in plain English.

First lesson: fewer indexed pages isn’t necessarily bad

This was probably my biggest misconception.

I had assumed that:

More indexed pages = better SEO.

Therefore, if the number of indexed pages fell:

Something must be wrong.

That’s not necessarily the case.

Google’s own Search Console documentation specifically warns that “Not indexed” is not necessarily bad. The important question is why a URL isn’t indexed and whether you actually want that URL appearing in Google.

Google Search Console Page Indexing Report

That changed how I looked at the problem.

The objective isn’t to get every URL your website happens to generate into Google.

The objective is to get the right pages indexed.

We discovered that my WordPress site had accumulated clutter

Like many WordPress users, over the years I had created tags fairly freely.

If I wrote an article about a particular subject, I might create another tag.

And another.

And another.

I hadn’t really considered what WordPress was doing behind the scenes.

Each tag can potentially create another archive page.

Categories can create archive pages.

Authors can create archive pages.

Dates can create archives.

Before long, a relatively straightforward website can generate a surprising number of URLs.

Many of those pages provide little additional value because they simply reorganise content that already exists elsewhere on the site.

Google recommends reducing unnecessary duplicate content because search engines can otherwise spend resources crawling URLs you don’t particularly care about.

Google’s guidance on SEO and AI search

In my case, I had already recently simplified my tags down to just two that genuinely made sense for my website:

HighLevel and MarketerM8.

But there was still some housekeeping to do.

ChatGPT walked me through Yoast

This was where using AI became particularly useful.

Rather than saying:

“Go and optimise your WordPress taxonomies.”

ChatGPT could work with me screen by screen.

I opened Yoast.

I shared what I could see.

We looked at the relevant settings.

We dealt with unnecessary archives and made decisions about which parts of the site actually deserved to be available to search engines.

We also discovered old sitemap entries that were no longer required and removed them.

None of these individual changes was particularly complicated.

The difficult part was knowing what should be changed and why.

That’s where I found AI particularly useful.

Then we stopped

This is an important part of the story.

Once we had made the changes, the temptation was to keep fiddling.

SEO doesn’t work like that.

Google needs time to recrawl pages and process changes. Indexing itself isn’t guaranteed simply because a page technically meets Google’s requirements.

Google Search Essentials

So rather than continually changing things, we decided to leave the website alone and monitor what happens over the coming weeks.

That is now part of my plan.

Make the changes. Record what was changed. Wait. Then compare the Search Console data.

The Performance report uncovered something even more interesting

Once I was beginning to understand the indexing side, we looked at the Search Console Performance data.

This is where things became much more commercially interesting.

Search Console gives you four particularly useful numbers:

Clicks. How many people clicked through to your website.

Impressions. How often your website appeared in Google’s search results.

CTR. The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click.

Average position. Roughly where your result appeared.

Google also lets you analyse this by individual search query and by individual page.

Learn more about the Search Console Performance report

On their own, those numbers don’t necessarily tell you much.

Together, they can uncover opportunities.

One of my biggest sources of impressions wasn’t actually particularly useful

When we analysed my data, something initially looked impressive.

One of my pages was generating a very large number of Google impressions.

Great.

Except it was my login page.

Suddenly those thousands of impressions didn’t look quite so exciting.

They were distorting my perception of how the website was performing.

This was a valuable lesson.

Not all impressions are equal.

A thousand impressions for something irrelevant to your business may be worth considerably less than 100 impressions from people searching for exactly the service you provide.

This is where having ChatGPT interrogate the data rather than simply summarise it became useful.

The question wasn’t:

“Which pages have the most impressions?”

It was:

“Which impressions actually matter?”

Then we found the opportunities hiding around positions 8 to 11

This was probably the most exciting discovery.

Some of my HighLevel-related content was already appearing for commercially relevant searches.

But some of it was sitting around positions 8, 9, 10 and 11.

Think about what that means.

I’m not trying to take an article that Google currently ranks at position 83 and somehow magically get it onto page one.

Google already appears to think some of this content is relevant.

I’m knocking on the door.

Moving from position 11 to position 7 could potentially make considerably more difference than creating another ten articles from scratch.

That gives me a completely different content strategy.

Instead of always asking:

“What should I write next?”

I can also ask:

“What content does Google already nearly rank highly, and how could I make it better?”

Search Console itself recommends looking at queries with high impressions and low click-through rates as potential opportunities to improve titles, descriptions and how well the page matches the search.

Google guidance on improving Search performance

And then there is AI Search

This is where the exercise gets particularly interesting for me.

I am not only interested in traditional Google SEO.

I also want my content to be discovered and referenced by AI systems.

Google itself is increasingly blending conventional search with generative AI through AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Interestingly, Google’s guidance is not that website owners need an entirely separate bag of tricks for AI.

Google says that its existing SEO best practices remain relevant to generative AI search. It recommends technically accessible websites and, importantly, unique, useful, expert-led content rather than commodity content that simply repeats information already available elsewhere.

Google’s guidance for AI search optimisation

That makes this experiment rather circular.

I am using AI to analyse how my website performs in search so that I can create better, more useful content that has a greater chance of being found through both traditional and AI-powered search.

Search Console is also beginning to tell us more about AI visibility

This area is developing quickly.

Google is increasingly providing website owners with more information about how their content appears in AI-powered search experiences.

That makes Search Console potentially even more important.

We’re moving towards a situation where website owners need to think about two related questions:

How visible am I in traditional Google Search?

and

How visible is my content within AI-generated search experiences?

The encouraging part is that the fundamentals overlap considerably.

How I would recommend doing this yourself

You don’t need to become an SEO expert before opening Google Search Console.

In fact, based on my experience, I’d approach it differently.

Open Search Console and use ChatGPT alongside it as your interpreter.

Start with the Page Indexing section.

Don’t immediately panic about the number of pages that aren’t indexed.

Ask:

Which important pages aren’t indexed?

Then look at the reasons Google provides.

If you don’t understand a term, don’t disappear down a two-hour SEO rabbit hole.

Show it to ChatGPT and ask:

“Explain what this means in plain English and tell me whether I actually need to do anything about it.”

Next, look at Performance.

Export the data if necessary.

Then start asking questions such as:

• Which search queries are generating the most useful impressions?
• Which pages are appearing frequently but getting few clicks?
• Which commercially relevant keywords are ranking between positions 5 and 15?
• Which pages have gained visibility recently?
• Which pages have lost visibility?
• Are any irrelevant pages distorting the figures?
• Which existing articles should I improve before creating new ones?
• What subjects does Google already appear to associate my website with?

That last question is particularly interesting.

Because Search Console isn’t just telling you what you want to rank for.

It’s showing you what Google already thinks your website is relevant for.

That is incredibly valuable intelligence.

Don’t blindly do everything AI tells you

There is an important caveat.

I wouldn’t recommend simply uploading Search Console data and saying:

“Fix my SEO.”

AI can misunderstand data.

It can make assumptions.

And SEO isn’t an exact science.

My approach was much more conversational.

ChatGPT would identify something.

I would look at it.

We would discuss what it meant.

I would show another screenshot.

We would investigate further.

Only then would I make a change.

In other words, I wasn’t handing my website over to AI.

I was using AI to help me understand my own website.

That’s an important distinction.

My biggest takeaway

For years I thought Google Search Console was really something for SEO specialists.

I now think I was looking at it the wrong way.

Search Console contains information that is incredibly valuable to any business owner with a website.

The problem is that Google presents that information using the language of search engines.

AI can act as the translator.

And once somebody translates things such as:

• Crawled, currently not indexed
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical
• Impressions
• CTR
• Average position

into normal business language, Search Console becomes considerably less intimidating.

More importantly, it becomes actionable.

What I’m doing next

For the moment, very little.

And that’s deliberate.

We’ve cleaned up some of the indexing signals on my website.

We’ve simplified some of the WordPress archive structure.

We’ve removed old sitemap entries.

We’ve identified irrelevant data that was distorting the picture.

And we’ve found existing HighLevel content sitting tantalisingly close to stronger page-one positions.

Now I’m going to give Google time to process those changes.

Then I’ll go back into Search Console and compare the results.

That’s when this gets really interesting.

Because rather than SEO being something mysterious happening in the background, I now have a process:

Measure. Understand. Change. Wait. Measure again.

And ironically, it took ChatGPT to finally make Google Search Console make sense to me.

A final thought

If you’ve connected Google Search Console to your website but rarely look at it because you don’t really understand what you’re looking at, you may already have far more useful SEO information than you realise.

You don’t necessarily need another SEO tool.

You may simply need a better way of interpreting the information Google is already giving you.

That was certainly true for me.

And it has completely changed the way I intend to use Google Search Console from now on.