Search Console widgets for your iPhone Home Screen and Lock Screen

The most common question anyone with a website asks Search Console is “how did we do yesterday”, and the most common thing they do with the answer is nothing. It is a glance. On the mobile web that glance costs a browser, a login check, a property picker and a wait. A widget costs nothing, which is why the widget is the feature that decides whether an app like this one becomes a habit.

This is what the QueryWatch widgets do, how to set them up, and the one thing they are not.

What a widget shows

Each widget is one property. It shows that property’s clicks for the last complete day Google has finalised, the change against the previous period, and a sparkline of the recent days so you can see whether the number is a blip or a trend. That is all, deliberately. A widget that tries to show four metrics shows none of them at a glance.

Home Screen widgets come in the usual sizes. Lock Screen widgets are the small ones that sit under the clock, and for a property you check every morning they are the right place: the number is there before you unlock the phone.

Setting one up

On iPhone, press and hold an empty area of the Home Screen, tap Edit, then Add Widget, and search for QueryWatch. Pick a size and add it. Then press and hold the widget itself, choose Edit Widget, and select the property it should show. Repeat for each property you want on the Home Screen; a widget per client is a sensible way to lay out an agency’s phone, and iOS lets you stack several of the same size and swipe between them.

For the Lock Screen, press and hold the Lock Screen, tap Customise, choose the Lock Screen, tap the widget area under the clock and pick QueryWatch. On Android, press and hold the home screen, choose Widgets, and find QueryWatch in the list.

If the widget shows no data, open the app once so it has signed in and loaded the property; widgets read from the app’s cache rather than from Google directly.

When it updates

Honestly: less often than you might expect, and it does not matter. iOS decides when widgets refresh, within a budget it manages per app, so a widget is not a live ticker. But Search Console data is finalised two to three days after the fact anyway, so the number a widget shows is a finished day, and it changes once a day, not once a minute. A widget that refreshed every five minutes would show the same number for five minutes at a time. Why the data is days behind explains the lag; the widget just lives with it, which is the right amount of attention to pay to Search Console on most days.

What a widget is not

A widget is passive. It shows you the number if you look. It will not tap you on the shoulder when the number falls, and no widget can, because a widget only runs when the system draws it.

If what you want is “tell me when it moves”, that is a push alert, which is a different mechanism: something has to check Search Console while your phone is asleep, which means a server with permission to read your data. Alerts are QueryWatch’s Pro feature, and the alerts page explains exactly what that involves, including where your Google token goes. The widget and the alert complement each other: the widget for the daily glance, the alert for the day you were not glancing.

Why they are free

Widgets are on the free tier for every property, on every plan. Some apps in this category charge for them, and we understand why: the widget is the thing people want most. That is exactly why we do not. A widget is the reason you open the app, and charging for the reason to open the app is how a free tier turns into a demo.

What we charge for is depth: sixteen months of history, the push alerts, the exports, the unlimited watchlist. The free and Pro split is written out in full, and the short version is that the number of properties and the number of widgets are never the thing you pay for.