Google Search Console linked and verified with healthy crawl stats

Without Google Search Console verification, you have no visibility into which queries drive impressions, which pages get indexed, or when Google flags your site for manual actions, security issues, or Core Web Vitals regressions. You also lose the ability to submit sitemaps, request recrawls after migrations, and disavow spam backlinks — every SEO recovery operation depends on having the property verified first.

Add the verification meta tag to app/layout.tsx so it ships with every page render:

export const metadata = {
  verification: { google: 'YOUR_VERIFICATION_CODE' }
}

After deploy, complete verification in Search Console and submit https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml through the Sitemaps report.