Google Search Console: How to Manage owners, users, and permissions

You can be an owner or user of a property. Each of these roles has different rights and capabilities. You can grant permissions to other users only if you are a property owner.

See and manage the user list in (site) Settings Settings > Users and permissions in Search Console.

MANAGE USERS AND PERMISSIONS

Permissions

Each user for a Search Console property is assigned one of the following permissions:

  • Owner: Has full control over properties in Search Console. Owners can add and remove other users, configure settings, view all data, and use all tools. A property must have at least one verified owner, or no users will have access to the property.
  • Full user: Has view rights to all data and can take some actions.
  • Restricted user: Has simple view rights on most data.
  • Associate: Associates are people or accounts that can take certain actions on behalf of your site, or access certain data. Unlike site owners and users, associates can’t open or view your Search Console account or data directly but they are authorized to perform other tasks. The actions and permissions vary depending on the type of association (for example, Chrome Web store or YouTube channel).

Permission details

FeatureOwnerFull userRestricted user
View all reports
Property settings (geotargetingcrawl rate)View only
URL ParametersView only
Change of AddressView onlyView only
User administrationDetailsDetails
Index CoverageView only
Blocked URLs
URL InspectionFetch only
Performance
Links
Remove URLsView only
Rich result status reports
Receive messages1
Reconsideration request 
Disavow links 
Link Google Analytics account  
Add / remove property owners  
Data Highlighter 
Verify fixes 
Share report links 
Add users  
Submit sitemap  

1 Restricted users receive only messages that specifically affect them.

We lost our site owner!

If the only verified owner of your site leaves your team, or you’re not sure who the verified owner is, you (or someone you know) should verify ownership to maintain (or regain) access to the property.

If you are taking over a site from another owner, after you verify ownership you can unverify previous owners by removing their verification token (for example, removing the HTML tag from the site, for HTML-tag-verified owners). See Add or remove owners for more information.Add or remove users

A property can have a maximum of 100 users with edit or view-only permissions.

You must be a property owner (or an owner of a parent property) to add or remove a user.

To add a new user

  1. Choose a property in Search Console.
  2. Click the Settings icon  in the navigation pane.
  3. Click Users & permissions.
  4. Click Add user and select the permissions to grant the user. Type the Google Account name (email) of the new user. (One must have a Google Account to be granted access to a Search Console property.)
  5. Choose the permission level to grant the user.
  6. The new user must add the property to their property list in order to access it.

To delete a user

  1. Choose a property in Search Console.
  2. Click the Settings icon  in the navigation pane.
  3. Click Users & permissions.
  4. Select the More menu next to the user to delete and click Remove access. The change should take effect very quickly.

Add or remove owners

A property owner has verified themself through some sort of verification token (HTML page or tag, DNS record, or some other method).

If all owners are removed, then all users will lose access to the property, after a grace period. Data for the property will continue to be collected, but nobody will have access to it until someone verifies ownership of the property.

To add yourself as an owner

You can’t add someone else as verified owner from within Search Console, because they need to create a token themself associated with their personal Google account. However, they can share their token with someone who can take the appropriate action to verify them as a property owner (for instance, upload their HTML verification file to the appropriate site location).

To delete an owner

  1. To remove a verified owner from a property, you must delete all tokens used to verify their ownership of the property. For example, the HTML verification file for HTML file upload, or the Google Analytics tracking code for the Analytics code verification method.
  2. Open the Users and Permissions page.
  3. Next to the owner that you want to remove, select Manage property owners.
  4. See all the verification methods listed for that user. You must remove the verification token for each verification method listed. For instance, if “HTML Tag” is listed, you must remove the HTML <meta> tag for that person from the site. If “HTML File” is listed, you must remove the HTML verification file for that person from the site. See details about each verification method here. If you don’t remove all verification tokens for a user, they will be reverified as an owner on any remaining tokens.
  5. Click Unverify next to the user’s name to unverify the unwanted owner. The owner’s verification token must be gone, or else the unverify request will fail.

Don’t recognize an owner?

If you’ve found an owner that you don’t recognize, you might have been hacked. A hacker can probably add their token back after you’ve removed it, so you should either visit the Webmasters Hacked! site and try to secure your website yourself, or else contact a website security professional to help you secure your site.Change permissions for an existing user

You must be a verified owner to be able to change permissions of another user.

You can change permissions for any non-verified owner.

If you want to upgrade a user to an owner, or downgrade them from an owner to a user, see Add or remove owners.

To change user permissions:

  1. Open the Users and Permissions page for your property.
  2. Next to the user that you want to modify, select a different permission level.
  3. The change should take effect very quickly.