Search Console API, more news from Google

About a year ago, Martin Splitt anticipated Google’s intention to open Search Console Apis to third-party platforms as well: now the company has taken a further step towards this goal, as explained in a recent post on the official blog. The system was in fact at the center of a constant work of infrastructural upgrading, which led to some small changes and described in the article.

What are the Search Console APIs

We should now know almost everything about the Google Search Console, the free platform that monitors the performance of a site in Google Search and offers various tools and reports to ensure that Google can properly scan or test the validity of a particular page.

The Search Console provides programmatic access to the service via documented Apis on this page, which allow for example to query search analysis data and manage sitemaps, as well as (tool currently in experimental phase) to run validation tests on a single URL.

The latest interventions on Search Console APIs

The post signed by Nati Yosephian, Search Console Software Engineer, describes the very latest updates related to this topic, which were aimed at helping Google to improve API performance in the face of growing demand and, at the same time, limit the visible impact on users.

Before listing the recent changes, there is an important premise: no action is required if we are not interrogating the Apis, while the information is useful to those who use the APIs for their data or to those who manage a tool that uses such data (eg. a WordPress plugin).

The list of recent changes

• Changes on the Google Cloud Platform dashboard: we will notice a drop in the old API usage report and an increase in the new one.

In particular, we will see a decrease in traffic for the API legacy and an increase in calls to the new one: it is the same API, only proposed under the new name. We can monitor API usage on the new page.

• Changes to the Discovery document: if we are querying Apis using a third-party API library or using the Webmasters Discovery document directly, we will need to do an update later this year. After December 31, 2020, in fact, Google will stop support for this document, although there will be more details about it.
• Changes to the API key restrictions: if you have previously set restrictions to the API key, you may need to change them.

Apart from these changes, the new APIs are compatible with previous versions and there is no change in purpose or functionality at the moment.

The changes to the API keys restrictions

The intervention that is a bit more complex is the one concerning the changes to the API key restrictions, because to perform the operation there is only time until the next August 31st.

To check if we have an active API limitation on our API key, you must connect to the credential page and follow the steps indicated.

To allow automatic migration of API calls to the new Google infrastructure it is essential that there are no restrictions, and therefore the article reiterates the concept:

• If the API key restrictions are set to “Do not limit”, you do not need to intervene and we are ready to migrate.
• If the API key restrictions are set to “Limit key”, the Search Console API must be controlled as shown in this image (again from the Google webmaster blog).