You don't need to drown in dashboards. Two free tools tell you almost everything: Google Search Console (how you're doing on Google) and GA4 (what people do once they land).
The handful of numbers worth watching:
- Impressions and clicks. Are more people seeing you, and are they clicking?
- Average position. Are you climbing over time?
- Which queries and pages are moving, up or down.
- AI traffic. In GA4, filter your sources for chatgpt, perplexity, gemini. Most people are surprised it's already there.
That's it. You're looking for two things: what's growing, so you can do more of it, and what's slipping, so you fix it before it falls off. Everything else is noise until you've nailed those.