Search Console is where your data comes from. Prism is where it goes to live.
You do not have to pick one. Prism connects to Search Console by read-only OAuth and copies what it hands back, so you keep both. The real question is what happens to the copy afterwards.
The one difference that matters.
Google serves a rolling 16-month window. On the day month 17 arrives, month one is gone, and no export run afterwards will bring it back.
Every year-on-year comparison you will ever be asked for depends on somebody having kept the data while it still existed, and the somebody is never Google.
months is all Google serves. The window rolls: month 17 is dropped, not archived.
Google Search Console
Prism’s copy
today
Same data. Two different fates.
Google Search Console
- Serves a rolling 16 months, then drops the rest
- Queried live, with the detailed rows capped
- Numbers finalised two to three days after the fact
- The only place to submit a sitemap or request indexing
Prism
- Keeps every day permanently, past month 16
- Answers from its own store, with true totals kept separately
- Yesterday corrects itself as Google finalises
- Read-only by construction: no write scope exists
Side by side.
Everything in the Search Console column is Google’s own documented behaviour.
| Google Search Console | Prism | |
|---|---|---|
| How far back does the data go? | A rolling 16 months. Older days drop off the back and cannot be recovered. | Whatever Google still had on the day you connected, then every day since, kept permanently. |
| Where does the data live? | Google's servers, queried live each time you open it. | Your own store: reports open from Prism's database instead of queueing behind an API, refreshed by a daily sync. |
| What happens on a big query? | Rows are capped, so a detailed breakdown does not add up to the reported total. | The total you see is the real one, because true per-date totals are kept separately from the capped rows. |
| Are late corrections handled? | Numbers are finalised two to three days after the fact. | Yesterday corrects itself as Google finalises: every sync re-pulls the trailing five days. |
| Can you group queries by meaning? | No. Filtering is by string match. | Yes. Queries are compared on what they mean rather than how they are spelled. |
| Can you see when the ranking page for a query changed? | You can filter to one query and list the pages returned for it inside the window you are looking at. | Yes, with dates: the handovers of the page predominantly shown for the query, each confirmed over the days that follow it, across the whole stored history. |
| Does it crawl your site? | No. It reports on what Google already knows. | Yes, every page, with Lighthouse scoring, and findings classified by what each one is doing to your search traffic. |
| Does it watch AI answer engines? | No. | Yes, across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on a schedule you set. |
| Can you submit a sitemap or request indexing? | Yes. This is what it is for. | No. Prism has read-only access and cannot change anything in your Google account. |
You still need Search Console
Prism reads from it, so the account has to exist and stay connected. Submitting a sitemap, requesting indexing and checking a manual action all still happen in Google.
Keep both. Search Console is the source; Prism is the memory around it.
Do you still need Search Console?
Does Prism replace Search Console?
No, and it cannot. Search Console is where the data comes from. Prism connects to it by read-only OAuth and copies what it returns. You still need the Google account, and you will still go to Search Console to submit a sitemap or request indexing.
What does Prism keep that Search Console throws away?
All of it, after month 16. Google serves a rolling 16-month window and drops the rest. Prism stores every daily sync permanently, so the history grows instead of rolling off the back.
Why do the numbers sometimes differ from Search Console?
Google caps the rows it returns on a detailed query, so the sum of the query rows comes out lower than the true total. Prism stores real per-date totals separately from the detailed rows for exactly this reason, and shows you the total rather than the sum of a truncated list.
When month 17 arrives, month one is gone.
Every month you wait is a month that will eventually fall off the back of Google’s window and cannot be recovered afterwards. Connecting is free for ten properties, the access is read-only, and the backfill starts without being asked.