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Are Google Search Console Email Alerts Enough?

May 22, 2026 - 7:31 am 0 — by Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz / Executive Editor

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land . He is well known & respected for his expertise in the search marketing industry. He only provides consulting services to expert SEOs and also performs search marketing expert witness or on LinkedIn and read his full bio over here . 38,445 Articles as barry.schwartz Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization

Are you the type of SEO that digs into all the Google Search Console reporting every single day, to find technical issues or other problematic issues? Or do you sit back and just wait for an email from Search Console warning you about an issue you need to address?

More importantly, which is the right thing to do? Or is it something in the middle.

John Mueller from Google kind of addressed this question on Reddit when asked How do you balance GSC alerts vs actual log digging for small sites?

John said it depends on the platform you use for your site, how many pages are on the site, how much content is published and so on.

Here is what he said:

I find the email alerts pretty helpful (I know, I might be biased), they tend to alert me of the bigger issues, and with a click I can double-check what SC actually shows (and often, ignore it -- which is fine to me, because it's low effort to check). I generally focus on the clearly technical issues like 404, blocked by robots, noindex -- and mostly ignore the canonical issues (since it's less in my control, and ultimately, I don't care as much which URL is actually canonical).

I *suspect* most modern sites don't have to worry about crawl / indexing errors as much as they used to. If you're using a good hosting platform (Wix, Squarespace, etc) or hosting with a reasonable plan on a good hosting provider with a reasonable CMS setup, then most of the issues will either be temporary blips or Google not recognizing that you meant something to happen (blocking with robots, setting noindex, etc). For any site hosted like that, you can probably ignore the indexing report for months (and glance at the email alerts), unless you see significant drops in traffic. As a site gets larger (100's of k's of pages), then focusing on the technical issues makes more sense, especially the kinds of issues that affect a large number of pages at once (response time when crawling, DNS errors, crawl issues, significant 404s / indexes, etc).

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I am currently offline for the Shavout holiday , this post was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today.

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