Before starting: Note that according to WordPress.com “. . . verifying your site with these services (search engines) is not necessary in order for your site to be indexed by search engines.“

Prerequisites:

This guide assumes you already have your WordPress.com site set up and you already have an account with Google Analytics / Google Search Console.

Steps:

Log into your WordPress.com site.

Go to Marketing and change the displayed options to “Traffic”.

Under “Marketing and Integrations” scroll down to “Site verification services”.

There you will see an option to provide a HTML google-site-verification code.

To retrieve this code you need to login to the sites associated Google Search Console account.

Login to Google Search Console and under the heading “Google Search Console” you will either see a drop down option to “Add Property” i.e. as in a site you own or the name of your site, or sites, that you previously registered.

If you have not registered your domain before then submit the site address now under the domains option. If you have submitted your site before click on your site name.

On the “Ownership verification” page you will see “Additional verification methods” at the bottom of the page.

Expand the HTML Tag option to reveal the HTML google-site-verification code.

Copy this code and return to the WordPress.com “Marketing and Integrations” page.

Paste the code into the HTML google-site-verification code section.

Save the settings in WordPress.com.

Return to the Google Search Console “Ownership verification” page and verify.

Your WordPress.com site has now been verified with Google.