Nowadays one account. In the past I spread them out - similar to Google Analytics - to make it a tiny bit harder for Google to understand the websites are owned and operated by the same person. More on reddit.com

Hey just wondering for people with multiple sites. Do you put all your sites on one search console account or spread them out to different accounts? More on beta.reddit.com

Considering how low effort it takes to set it up and the value it gives - I'd place it as very important. Once your ownership is confirmed; that's well and done. You don't need to verify each individual page but maintain the original verification method (don't remove that snippet). Though I would still recommend you do DNS verification, if you can, as then you can setup a domain property. Robots.txt - also important, again because it's low effort. At the very least, just have a line pointing to the sitemap.xml Sitemap.xml - Important; at least for your key pages. As with all SEO activities; none of these are necessary to make sure you're indexed but makes the crawlers' job easier and search engines like that. More on reddit.com

I dont look at GA often at all. Did not do it back when I was full time SEO consultant either. The only valuable things there for me is to look at AI search referrers and to compare channels. Also to run some kind of landing page report. But this is SEO not SEM so I tend to fall more towards GSC. You can clearly see in SEMRush that AIO is very volatile. I dont think there is any point in optimizing for AIO right here and now. You could have 500 keywords that trigger AIO today and 200 that triggers AIO next month (that has a link to your domain). What we need is a tool that shows brand mentions and quotas in AI search. However, I question the real value of being quoted or having a brand mention as it is very difficult to measure the effect of something that has less than 1% CTR. I know Barry and his gang is pushing the agenda of brand mentions really hard on their news websites I think they even had a guy with 25 years of experience doing it there (so it must be true), "its the new KPI". Yeah.. but how can you attribute a sale to a brand mention? I understand this is the new KPI if you want to sell subscriptions to Otterly/SEMRush (with the AI plugin) that owns his website, but sounds like "classic SEO consultant bullshit" IMHO ("you have to fix your alt-texts its critical" LOL). More on reddit.com