Google Search Console mistakenly sent emails to site owners informing them that Google had just started recording impressions starting April 12. The implication of the message is that Search Console did not collect these impressions before, which is incorrect.
Search Console Impressions
The Search Console Impressions report shows how often a site appears in Google search results, whether users clicked or not. The impression ratio itself is not the metric to pay attention to, rather the meaningful metrics are the associated keywords and their positions in the search results. This allows an SEO to identify high-value keyword performance and make better decisions to address performance gaps.
The report breaks down queries by:
1. Queries (what people searched for)
2. Pages (which URLs appeared)
3. Country (where the researchers were geographically located)
4. Devices (desktop, mobile and tablet)
5. Search Appearance (indicates whether impressions come from rich results, videos, Web Light, and merchant listings)
Actual Search Console reporting errors
Google sent the following message to Search Console users:
“Google systems confirm that on April 12, 2026, we started collecting Google search impressions for your website in Search Console. This means that your website pages are now appearing in Google search results for certain queries. Here’s how you can monitor your site’s search performance using Search Console.”
This is an interesting post because it comes after it was revealed that Google had been incorrectly reporting impressions since May 13, 2025. A note in a Google support page from April 3 explained:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6211453#performance-reports-search-results-discover-google-news&zippy=%2Cperformance-reports-search-results-discover-google-news
“A logging error is preventing Search Console from accurately reporting impressions as of May 13, 2025. This issue will be resolved over the next few weeks; as a result, you may notice a decrease in impressions in the Search Console Performance report. Clicks and other metrics were not affected by the error, and this issue only affected data logging.”
Is today’s erroneous rating related to fixes to the impressions report? Google’s John Mueller described it as a simple glitch.
Mueller posted comments on Bluesky about the message in response to a query on this subject:
“Sorry, it’s just a normal problem, unrelated to anything else.”
This is curious because it appears that impression reporting errors and this erroneous messaging may be linked. Are they related or is it just a problem?
