When Sam Altman accidentally leaked OpenAI Siteowner-Central (OSC) in January 2026 at a private event for investors, a collective gasp went through the SEO industry. For twenty years, Google Search Console (GSC) had been the only dashboard that mattered. Suddenly, the “Black Box” of LLM optimization had a user interface.
Now that OSC has been in public beta for three months, the question on every Agentic SEO’s mind is: How does it compare to the incumbent?
In the Agentic Age, speed is not just a luxury; it is a prerequisite for being included in the inference context. If your site loads too slowly, the agent times out before it can even parse your vectors.
Google Search Console (GSC) is the definitive dashboard for monitoring your site’s speed/health. Unlike lab tools (Lighthouse), GSC uses CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) data. This means it judges you based on what real users are experiencing on their actual devices (mostly cheap Android phones on 4G networks).
In the blue corner, we have the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, handling over 91% of global search traffic: Google Search Console (GSC).
In the red corner, we have the scrappy, feature-rich underdog, backed by the AI might of Microsoft: Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT).
For nearly two decades, SEOs have treated GSC as the “Must Have” and BWT as the “Nice to Have.” But in 2026, with the rise of integration between Bing and ChatGPT, and Google’s shift to Gemini-powered results, the landscape has shifted.
For 20 years, the “Sitemap” has been the standard for indexing. You create a list of URLs, you tell the search engine where it is, and then you wait. you expect the crawler to come back… eventually.
In the Agentic Web, “eventually” is too slow. News breaks in seconds. AI models update in real-time. If your content isn’t indexed now, it might as well not exist.
Enter IndexNow, an open protocol championed by Microsoft Bing and Yandex.
Seeing the “Excluded” number rise in your Page Indexing report is enough to give any SEO anxiety. But in the modern agentic web, indexing issues are often diagnostic tools rather than failures. They tell you exactly how Google perceives the value of your content.
This guide decodes the most common error statuses and provides actionable fixes.
The Big Two: Discovered vs. Crawled
The most confusing distinction in GSC is between “Discovered” and “Crawled.” They sound the same, but they mean very different things for your infrastructure.
Google Search Console (GSC) is broken for the AI era. It was strictly designed for “Blue Link” clicks.
It currently lumps AI Overview impressions into general search performance, or hides “zero-click” generative impressions entirely.
The Blind Spot
We estimate that 30% of informational queries are now satisfied by AI Overviews without a click. The user sees your brand, reads your snippet, learns the fact, and leaves.
- Brand Impact: Positive (Awareness).
- GSC Impact: Zero (No click).
This “Invisible Traffic” builds brand awareness but doesn’t show up in your analytics.
Google Search Console (GSC) has historically been the dashboard of record for SEOs. But in the agentic era, GSC is becoming a lagging indicator. It often fails to report on the activity of new AI agents, RAG bots, and specialized crawlers. To truly understand how the AI ecosystem views your site, you must return to the source: Server Logs.
The Limitations of GSC
GSC is designed for Google Search. It tells you little about how ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), or Perplexity are interacting with your site. If GPTBot fails to crawl your site due to a firewall rule, GSC will never tell you.
If you are reading this in late 2025, you are likely already tired of juggling Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and the eclectic mix of dashboards required to monitor the Agentic Web. But there is one dashboard that is conspicuously missing, or rather, just starting to emerge from the whispers of Silicon Valley: The OpenAI Site Owner Console (OSOC).
Rumors of its existence have been circulating since Sam Altman’s leaked “SearchGPT” demo back in 2024, but with the recent acceleration of OAI-SearchBot activity, it is no longer a question of if, but when and what.