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
Permissions
Each user for a Search Console property is assigned one of the following permissions:
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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. There are two types of owners, both have the same permissions:
- Verified owner:Someone who verified ownership of the property using a token to prove ownership (such as an HTML file uploaded to the website). To add or remove a verified owner, you must add or remove a token on the site.
- Delegated owner:Someone granted ownership status by a verified owner without the use of a verification token (such as an HTML file or tag). To add or remove a delegated owner, an owner of any type simply adds or removes the new owner using the Search Console user management screen.
- 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 peopleor accountsthat 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). Learn more about association.
Permission details
We lost our only verified site owner!
If the only verified owner of your site leaves your team, you 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 or delegated owners
Limits:
- Full/restricted/associate users:A property can have a maximum of 100 non-owners.
- Delegated ownerscan be added to a property until the property reaches 500 total verified + delegated owners. That is, if a property has 200 verified owners and 300 delegated owners, no new delegated owners can be added to that property.
- Verified ownershave no maximum per property. That is, if a property already has 500 owners of any type, you can still verify additional owners.
You must be a property owner(or an owner of a parent property) to add or remove another user.
Add a new user or delegated owner
- Open the property in Search Console.
- Open the Users and permissions page in property settings ( Settings > Users and permissions). This page is visible only if you're a property owner.
- Click Add user
- Enter the Google Account name (email) of the new user
- Users must have a valid Google Account .
- An email group cannot be added as a user.
- Choose the permission level (role) to grant the user.
- Save your changes.
- Enter the Google Account name (email) of the new user
If, when trying to add a new user, you get the error "This user may only be added as 'Owner'," it means that the user you are trying to add already owns a containing property and thus has implicit owner rights for this property. You can only add this person as an owner of this child property. Adding them as a full or restricted user would be a demotion in permissions on this child property, which isn't allowed.
Remove a user or delegated owner
- Open the property in Search Console.
- Open the Users and permissions page in property settings ( Settings > Users and permissions). This page is visible only if you're a property owner.
- Select themenu next to the user to delete and click Remove access. The change should take effect very quickly. If you see a notification warning that the user might regain access, this means that the user was a verified owner, and has one or more ownership tokens that might be used to regain access to this property. Remove the tokens listed in the notification to prevent the user from regaining access. You can also find this list by clicking Unused ownership tokens in the Users and permissions page.
Add or remove verified owners
Add a verified owner
- To add yourselfas a verified owner
- Follow the verification flow to prove ownership of a site.
- To add another personas a verified owner, you must add their personal verification token to the property:
- Ask the other user to start the verification flow to generate a personal token (an HTML file, HTML tag, or whatever type you want to use).
- Post their personal token in a place appropriate for that token (for instance, for HTML file verification, have them give you their HTML file and then upload it for them to the website).
- Tell the user to open the property in Search Console and click Verify.
Remove a verified owner
If all verified owners are removed, then all remaining users and delegated owners 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 .
- Follow the instructions for removing a delegated owner . When complete, you will be shown a popup that lists all verification tokens for this user in this property. You can also find this list by clicking Unused ownership tokensin the Users and permissions page.
- The deleted owner will immediately lose access to the property.
- Delete all verification tokens for this user in this property. If you do not delete these tokens, the removed owner will be able to re-verify ownership if they choose to (all current owners will be notified if this happens). When you remove the owner in the previous step, you will be shown the list of tokens associated with the removed owner. You can also see this list in the Unused tokens list for the property.If an owner used several verification methods, you should remove all tokens for that person.
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 web.dev 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
Requirements:
- You must be an owner to be able to change permissions of another user.
- You can change permissions for any non-verified owner.
To change permission level for another user:
- Open the property in Search Console.
- Open the Users and permissions page in property settings ( Settings > Users and permissions). This page is visible only if you're a property owner.
- Select themenu next to the user to delete and click Change permissions. If this option is not active, it means that the user is a verified owner; you can remove a verified owner , but not downgrade their access level.
- Choose the new permission level and save your change. The change should take effect very quickly. If the changed user does not see the change, ask them to refresh their page in the browser.
Determine your own or someone else's permission level
Determine your own permission level
- Open Settings page (click the settings icon in the navigation pane).
- Find the Ownership verificationrow to see your permission. If you are an owner, you can click the row to see your verification details.
Determine someone else's permission level
- You must be an owner to determine someone else's access level.
- Open the Users and permissions page in property settings ( Settings > Users and permissions). This page is visible only if you're a property owner.
- Find the user that you're interested in. The Permissionrow will show each user's permission level. If the user is listed as both Ownerand Verified, it means that they are a verified owner. If a user is listed as Ownerwithout the word Verified, it means that they are a delegated owner .
Determine ownership verification methods
If you are a verified owner, you can determine the method(s) used to verify yourself or any other verified owners.
For yourself:
- Open the Ownership page in property settings ( Settings > Ownership verification)
- Click the Ownership verificationrow in the property settings table to see the method(s) used. To see the details about the exact tokens used, use Search Console as described below.
For another user, or to see your own token details:
- Open the Users and permissions page in property settings ( Settings > Users and permissions).
- Find the user that you're interested in.
- Click the( more icon) next to the user that you're interested in.
- Click Ownership verification detailsto see information about the tokens and methods used to verify this owner.
Find (and remove) unused ownership verification tokens
Ownership verification typically requires putting a token that is unique to a specific user in a specific location associated with a Search Console property.
When you remove an owner from a Search Console property, that owner cannot access the property any more, but their verification tokens are not deleted or revoked. As long as a user's verification token remains for a property, a deleted owner can re-verify ownership of the property.
You can see a list of remaining unused ownership tokens for verified owners that were removed from a property. As long as these tokens remain, the user associated with the token can re-verify ownership of the property, and regain access to the property. If a removed owner reverifies themselves, all current owners will receive a notification.
To see the list of unused ownership verification tokens:
- Open the Users and permissions page in property settings ( Settings > Users and permissions).
- Click Unused ownership tokensto see any remaining tokens for that property, and the user that they are associated with.
- Click a token in the list for more information.
To remove these tokens:
Use caution when removing tokens. The same verification token can be reused across various services to verify ownership (like Search Console, Merchant Center, Google Workspace, etc.), and removing those tokens could negatively impact other services relying on them. Learn more about how to verify your site ownership
.
Click a token in the list to see information about how to remove the token. Here is a little more information:
- HTML file upload:Look for the HTML file associated with the user at the root location for your site. The file will have a long alphanumeric name, and a single line of text that includes the string "google-site-verification". Remove this tag. Make sure that you remove only the tag assigned to the person you wish to remove.
- HTML tag:Look in the page source of your homepage for the user's tag, which looks something like this:
<meta name="google-site-verification" content=" some value " />. You must remove the tag from the page source HTML. Make sure that you remove only the tag associated with the user that you wish to remove. - Domain name provider:You must find and remove the DNS record associated with the user .
- Google Analytics account:In order to permanently disable this verification mechanism for this user, you must either switch Google Analytics accounts for this site, or else revoke edit rights given to this person in the Google Analytics account for this site. To determine which Google Analytics account is used for this site, look at the rendered source of the page (in Chrome, right-click and choose Inspect), and search for "UA- " or "G-" in the page code, which should correspond to your Google Analytics account.
- Google Tag Manager account:In order to permanently disable this verification method for this user, you must either switch Google Tag Manager accounts used on this site, or remove the person's Publish or Admin permission in the associated Google Tag Manager account.
- Google Sites/Blogger account:The owner of a Google Site or Blogger website will always have access to the associated property in Search Console. To completely remove access, the owner of the Google Site or Blogger website must be switched (because a Google Site or Blogger account must always have one and only one owner).
See ownership event history
You can see a history of ownership events, including owners added and removed, successful and unsuccessful verification attempts, and cases where a previously known verification token has been removed.
To see ownership event history for a property:
- Open the Users and permissions page in property settings ( Settings > Users and permissions).
- Click Ownership history.
