Getting found, and seeing what worked
Titles, sitemaps, search engines, AI assistants, and where the numbers live.
Overview
SEO is mostly two things: telling search engines what each page is, and not getting in their way. The second part is already done for you — your site is fast, works on a phone, publishes a sitemap that stays current on its own, and describes your business, locations, products, posts, and FAQs in the structured data search engines and AI assistants read, with the social profiles from your business details attached.
The first part is a handful of fields, and this guide is a tour of where they are.
Nothing here needs submitting anywhere. Your sitemap and robots file are generated for you and update themselves as pages, products, and posts change.
Your site's title and description
These are the defaults everything else falls back to — what a browser tab is headed with, and the sentence under your name in a search result.
- In the side navigation, open Home, click the gear button below View site on the Home panel, and choose Settings.
- Under Site, open Brand & SEO.
- Page title — left blank, your site's name is used.
- Description — the sentence or two under the title in a search result.
- Favicon — the small square in a browser tab and in bookmarks.
- Social share image — the picture that comes up when someone posts a link to your site. 1200×630 works everywhere.
Write the description for a person deciding whether to click, not for a search engine. It's an ad, not a keyword list.
Per-page titles and descriptions
Each page can override the site-wide defaults with its own title, description, and social image. You'll find them in the editor: open a page and click an empty part of the canvas so nothing is selected, and the page's own fields appear in the right-hand panel.
The same panel is where you hide a page from search engines, which is what you want for a thank-you page or anything you only ever link to directly.
Products have their own: each product's editor has a Search engine listing card with a preview of the result, and Write with AI can draft it from the product's photos and details.
A page-level title beats the site-wide one. If a search result is showing wording you thought you'd changed, check whether you changed it on the page or in Settings.
Google Search Console and Bing
Search Console is where Google tells you what it makes of your site — which pages it has indexed, what people searched before clicking, and anything it couldn't read. It's free, and it's the closest thing to real SEO feedback you'll get.
To prove the site is yours, Google and Bing each give you a verification code. Paste it into the Search & AI visibility section of Brand & SEO and we'll put it on your site where they expect to find it.
AI assistants
The same Search & AI visibility section has a switch for whether AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini — may crawl your site. It's on unless you turn it off, so being cited and linked is the default.
Turning it off doesn't affect your ordinary Google results, and it can't keep you out of Google's AI Overviews, which use the same crawler as search itself.
Where the numbers are
Traffic, under System in the side navigation, shows how many people visited your site: visits, page views, your top pages, and where visitors came from — with a Campaigns table for links you've tagged with utm_ tags, and clicks on your Google, Microsoft, TikTok, or ChatGPT ads counted as campaign traffic even without tags. We count it ourselves, without cookies, and none of it is shared with Google, Meta, or anyone else.
Home puts the headline numbers side by side for the last 7, 28, or 90 days (visits, plus orders and sales if you sell) and lists what's waiting to be fulfilled. Search — under Presence — shows what visitors typed into your site's search box. Insights, beside Traffic, puts what sold beside what visitors searched for and couldn't find, with a fix for each gap and an AI summary when you want one.
Connecting Google Analytics
Traffic covers how many people came, from where, and what they looked at. If you also use Google Analytics or the Meta Pixel, connect them too. The place to do it is not where most people look first.
- In your site's Settings, under Access & legal, open the Cookie banner card.
- Paste your Google Analytics 4 Measurement ID, your Meta Pixel ID, or both.
- Switch on Show the cookie banner on this site. The tags only load while the banner is on.
- Save. The tags now load on your site — in Basic consent mode, the default, only for visitors who accept analytics or marketing cookies in the banner.
They live with the cookie banner because that's what governs them: in Basic consent mode, a visitor who declines never has the tag loaded at all. It also means your analytics will undercount, by exactly the number of people who said no. That's the trade, and it's the right way around.
What actually moves the needle
The settings above are the floor, not the work. What lifts a small site in search is unglamorous:
- Write pages about the specific things you do, in the words your customers use for them.
- Give every page a title that would make sense on its own in a list of search results.
- Publish something occasionally — posts are how a site stays worth re-crawling.
- Get listed where your customers already look, and linked to from anywhere real.
- Read your site's own search box. Empty searches are your visitors telling you which page you haven't written yet.
Frequently asked questions
No. Your sitemap and robots file are generated for you and stay current as your pages, products, and posts change. Adding the site to Search Console is still worth doing, because that's where Google reports back to you.
Take the verification code Google gives you and paste it into the Search & AI visibility section of Brand & SEO, in your site's Settings. Bing has its own field beside it.
In your site's Settings, under Access & legal, on the Cookie banner card — not under Integrations, which is where most people look. The Meta Pixel field is beside it.
In Basic consent mode, the default, analytics tags only load for visitors who accepted analytics cookies. Everyone who declined is invisible to them, which is the point of asking.
Yes. Traffic, under System in the side navigation, shows visits, page views, your top pages, and where visitors came from, all counted without cookies. Home shows your orders and sales beside your visits, Search shows what visitors looked for on your site, and Insights puts what sold beside what they couldn't find.
For one page, open it in the editor and click an empty part of the canvas so nothing is selected — the page's own SEO fields appear. For the whole site, use Brand & SEO in Settings.
Yes — the page's own fields in the editor include a show or hide setting for search engines. Useful for thank-you pages and anything you only ever link to directly.
Set a social share image, at 1200×630, in Brand & SEO — and check the page's own social image if you've set one there. Some platforms cache the old preview for a while after you fix it.
For most businesses, yes — it's how you get cited and linked in an AI answer. The switch is in Search & AI visibility if you'd rather opt out; it won't change your ordinary Google results either way.
Days to weeks for a new site, and longer to rank for anything competitive. Getting the pages and titles right early matters more than any single setting.