Sitepoint had a blog entry today on Google Sitemap’s Site Statistics feature. You don’t need to publish a Sitemap in order to use the feature – you just need a Google account (Gmail, Adsense, API) and access to the server so you can confirm that it’s your site. Once you’ve confirmed you own the site, Google will tell you the top searches through which users find your site. I already have this information through AWStats and the top 5 searches recorded by AWStats and Google seem to be the same. Whilst AWStats uses referrer information, I believe Google does some magic with gifs to record which search results you click on.

The page will also tell you the most popular queries to Google which your site turns up for. This is something AWStats won’t give you. The crawl statistics page shows some distribution information for pages Googlebot has crawled. Page analysis will show you statistics such as how many HTTP errors and what MIME types the files Google found on your site are. Google also points you towards methods of finding some statistics using Google itself such as the site: operator, link: operator, etc.

You can find in depth information here. 

It’s nice that Google are beginning to open up some of this information to webmasters. I would have liked to have been able to see more than just the top 5 search results and to have seen some more "useful" information. I’m a little surprised that this is integrated with Sitemaps rather than Analytics/Adwords. They are slightly different things but both provide information to webmasters on their site.