Skip to content

Discoverability

How to verify site ownership in Search Console

Verification is what gives you the other side of the conversation: which pages were indexed, which were rejected and why, manual actions, and the ability to submit a sitemap rather than wait to be found.

What 13x checks

This is rule discoverability.site-verification in the public registry: Search-console ownership is verified. It runs on every audit, against the pages we actually fetched, and its result is derived from the response rather than estimated.

Surface
Discoverability
Score weight
3 of the readiness score
Scope
Runs on every audited page
Applies
To every site

Registry version 2026-07-30. Every rule is published, and the audit is deterministic — the same page produces the same finding every time.

The fix

The same text the audit hands you when this check fails on your own site.

Verify the domain in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Until you do, you are launching without the only direct report on how search engines see the site.

Fastest method — a meta tag. Google Search Console → Add property → URL prefix → HTML tag:

html code
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="YOUR_TOKEN" />
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="YOUR_BING_TOKEN" />

Better method — DNS TXT. Add the record at your registrar:

Configuration
Type: TXT
Name: @
Value: google-site-verification=YOUR_TOKEN

DNS verification covers the whole domain including every subdomain, and survives a redesign that drops the meta tag. Choose "Domain" rather than "URL prefix" when adding the property.

Once verified, do the three things verification exists for:

1. Submit https://example.com/sitemap.xml. 2. Read the Coverage report — it names the pages that were crawled and rejected, which nothing outside Search Console can tell you. 3. Confirm the email address on the account is one you actually read. Manual actions and security alerts arrive there and nowhere else.

Bing's tool imports directly from Search Console, so it is a few clicks once Google is done — and it is where ChatGPT's search results come from.

Framework-specific versions

Where the change differs enough to be worth writing out separately.

Does your site have this problem?

13x checks this and 112 others against your live URL in about 30 seconds. No account, and every finding comes with the fix for your framework.

No signup. Results in 30 seconds.

More discoverability checks