QueryWatch: Search Console app now on App Store and Google Play

QueryWatch is available today on the App Store and on Google Play. It is a native app for reading Google Search Console on a phone: every property you have access to on one screen, free, with no site limit, plus an optional Pro subscription for push alerts, longer history and client reports. It needs iOS 26 or later on iPhone and Android 12 or later on Android. QueryWatch is an independent app and is not affiliated with Google.

Where to download it

On iPhone, the listing is QueryWatch: Search Console App on the App Store, in the Business category with an age rating of 4+, free with in-app purchases. On Android, the same name is on Google Play, also in Business and also free with in-app purchases.

These are two native apps, not one website in a wrapper: Swift and SwiftUI on iPhone, Kotlin and Jetpack Compose on Android. Being native is what lets the app do the things a browser tab cannot do on a phone, such as widgets, push notifications and an offline cache. Google has never shipped a Search Console app of its own, and why that gap is still open is a story we have told separately.

What is free

Sign in with Google and every Search Console property your account can see appears, with real numbers on each. The free tier does not cap properties. For each one you get:

• Clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for the last 28 days, with the change against the previous period
• The top 100 queries and pages, country and device splits, 7, 28 and 90-day presets, and full query detail
• Striking distance: queries at positions 8 to 20, ranked by opportunity
• Change investigation: the top three pages, queries, countries or devices behind any move
• A watchlist of five saved queries, pages or query-page pairs
• Widgets: Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets for every property on iPhone, and home-screen widgets on Android
• Five URL inspections a day and your sitemap list
• A CSV export of whatever view you are looking at
• An offline cache, pull-to-refresh, favourites, and client tags and colours

For someone with one or two sites who wants yesterday’s number on the Home Screen and a list of queries worth working on, that is the product, not a preview of it.

What Pro adds

Pro costs $4.99 a month or $14.99 a year. New yearly subscribers can start with a first month for $0.99, after which the plan renews at $14.99 a year. There is no free trial, no weekly plan and no lifetime option, and the price never depends on how many sites you manage.

For that, Pro adds push alerts for four events: traffic drops and spikes, a new query entering your top 10, an indexing change on a URL you are watching, and sitemap errors. Each alert carries an evidence snapshot of what it saw when it fired. Pro also brings a weekly digest every Monday; 16 months of history with custom ranges and period comparison; the top 20 contributors in a change investigation, with the history kept; an unlimited watchlist and more than one Google account; unlimited URL inspections and Core Web Vitals per page; sitemap submit and delete; a comparison CSV and branded or white-label PDF reports; and a cannibalisation detector. Free vs Pro explains where the line sits and why.

Try it before you connect anything

Demo Mode runs the whole app on four sample properties, Pro screens included, with no sign-in. It is there so you can decide whether the app suits the way you work before you grant it access to anything. Every screen you see in Demo Mode is the same screen you will see with your own data.

How the alerts decide to fire

Every six hours, our relay compares each property’s latest complete day with the same weekday over the previous four weeks, so a quiet Sunday is measured against other Sundays rather than against a busy Tuesday. It fires when the move is at least 30 percent or at least two standard deviations, and both thresholds can be changed per property. There is a hard cap of one notification per property per day.

Search Console finalises its performance data about two to three days after the fact, for every tool built on it. So an alert cannot tell you about this morning; what it can do is tell you about a drop on the day the numbers become final, rather than the week after. The alerts page has the full mechanics.

What it asks of your Google account

You sign in through Google’s own sign-in sheet. QueryWatch asks for three scopes: openid and userinfo.email, which identify the account, and webmasters.readonly, which is read-only access to Search Console. Write access, the webmasters scope, is requested separately, at the moment a Pro user submits or deletes a sitemap, and not before.

The credential stays on your phone. On iPhone the refresh token is stored in the Keychain. On Android, Google Play services hold the grant and the app never receives a refresh token at all. A credential leaves the device in one situation: when you turn on push alerts, because something has to check Search Console while your phone is asleep. That something is our own server in Germany, where the credential is encrypted at rest and deleted when you turn alerts off. You can also remove QueryWatch’s access from your Google Account whenever you like, as Google’s help page on third-party access describes. Where does your Google token go? has the questions worth putting to any app like this one.

What is not in 1.0

Some things are missing on purpose. QueryWatch does not track rankings and never will: it shows the average position Google reports for queries you actually appeared for, and it does not scrape search results, which Google’s terms do not allow.

Other things are missing for now. There is no Google Analytics 4 data, no Bing Webmaster Tools data, no client logins or read-only sharing, no iPad or Mac layout, no AI summaries and no regex filtering inside the app. Several Search Console reports are not in it either: Discover, Google News, the breakdowns in the Page indexing report, and Search Console Insights. Verifying a new property, and reading anything the API does not carry, such as manual actions, still happen in Search Console on the web.

What comes next

The next items on the roadmap are Bing Webmaster Tools data in the same app, and Siri Shortcuts. Read-only sharing for clients is planned further out. These are plans rather than promises with dates attached, and the order may change with what people using the app ask for.

Getting started

1. Install QueryWatch from the App Store or Google Play.
2. Open it and choose Demo Mode if you want to look around first.
3. Tap Continue with Google, pick the account that has your Search Console properties, and approve read-only access.
4. Your properties load. Mark the ones you check most as favourites, and tag them by client if you manage sites for other people.
5. Add a widget for the property you want to see without opening anything.

The product page compares QueryWatch with the other ways to read Search Console on a phone. If something does not work the way this post says it should, the support page is where to tell us.