Which GSC searches are worth money? Sorting queries by intent

The searches in GSC worth money are the ones made by people deciding: comparing, pricing, choosing or hiring, without your name in the search, and already showing your site. Searches with your name come from people who know you already, and searches for a quick fact are answered on Google’s own page. Sort your queries into those groups and the short list of searches to work on first appears by itself.

Google Search Console (GSC) lists every search that showed your site, but it lists them by volume. Volume is the wrong order for a business: a search made by thousands of curious people can be worth less than one made by a few dozen ready to buy. Part 1 of this series explains what GSC is; this part shows how to read its queries for money.

Step 1: get the queries out of GSC

In GSC, open Performance → Search results, pick the longest date range that makes sense for you (a full year evens out seasons) and open the Queries tab. The export button downloads both the chart and the table.¹ Two limits to keep in mind:

• The table shows at most 1,000 rows, and searches made by very few people are left out for privacy.² The list is the top of your searches, not all of them.
• Google’s own bulk data export gives the most complete list of queries,³ if you need more than the top.

For most small and mid-sized sites, the top 1,000 is plenty to find the first month of work.

Step 2: separate your name from everything else

A search that contains your brand is a person who already knows you. Those clicks matter, but they come from your reputation, your ads and word of mouth, not from your pages winning a search. If you leave them in, a site can look healthy in GSC while it wins almost nothing from people who have never heard of it.

GSC now does this split for you. The Performance report has a branded and non-branded queries filter: open the filter bar, choose Query, then Branded or Non-branded.⁴ Google counts as branded the searches that include your brand name, your domain or a product or service specific to your brand, including common misspellings.⁴ Three things to know:

• Its data starts in March 2025, when the filter was introduced.⁵
• It isn’t available for sites with few impressions, or for a section of a site set up as its own property (such as example.com/blog/).⁴
• Google says some searches may be put in the wrong group, and the label doesn’t affect your ranking.⁵

If you don’t see the filter, do it by hand: filter queries that don’t contain your name. GSC accepts regular expressions in the query filter,⁴ so one line such as acme|acmee|acme co catches your name and its usual misspellings.

Step 3: sort what’s left by what the person wants

Take the non-brand list and give each search one of three labels. You can do it in a spreadsheet, by the words in the search:

• Looking up a fact. “what is…”, “when does…”, “who won”, opening hours, results, today’s weather. Google often answers these on its own results page. They bring impressions and almost no clicks, whatever your title says.
• Deciding. “best…”, “… vs …”, “price”, “cost”, “reviews”, “near me”, “alternatives”, “hire”, “quote”, “is it worth it”. A person comparing options or getting ready to act. This is where the money is.
• Everything else. Searches whose words don’t tell. Keep them; some will be worth a second look later.

Word lists are rough and that’s fine: you are sorting for order, not for a science paper. We showed what this sort can reveal on a large site in “10% of searches bring half the visits”.

Step 4: work first on deciding searches you already show for

From the deciding group, keep the searches where your site already gets impressions, ideally on the first page of results. Google already connects your site with them, so a better title, a clearer answer near the top of the page, or a page of its own often moves them faster than any new article would.

Then click each search in GSC to see which of your pages Google showed for it.⁶ Two things often appear:

• The wrong page. A pricing search showing your blog post instead of your service page. The fix is a link, a heading or a page, not more content.
• The title doesn’t use the searcher’s word. People search “price”, your title says “investment”. The title is the line they read in the results, so it should use their word.

Step 5: the “seen but not clicked” list

The last list is the cheapest to fix: searches where your page sits on the first page, is shown often, and gets few clicks. Google itself says a low click rate can mean people see your page but don’t think it answers their search, and suggests updating the title and description, or the content.⁶ Leave out the fact searches before you build it: no title earns a click that Google answered itself, and counting them makes your click rate look worse than it is. Part 4 of this series goes through the five causes of impressions without clicks and how to tell which one is yours.

What our deep audit does with this

Our deep audit runs these same steps on your own Search Console data, with read-only access:

• It splits searches that contain your site’s name from all the others, and reports both sides, so you see what you win from people who don’t know you yet.
• It sorts every search as looking up a fact, deciding, or neither, from the words in it, in English and Spanish.
• It lists the “seen but not clicked” searches: first page, shown at least 100 times, clicked at under half the rate that position usually gets. Fact searches are left out of that list and shown apart, as searches to stop counting when you judge a page.
• For each page, it finds the word most of its searches use that its title doesn’t, and proposes the new title.

It is a sort by words, so some searches will land in the wrong group; the lists show every search, so you can see each call. Every step comes with how you’ll see in GSC whether it worked.

Where to go next

Doing this by hand takes an afternoon the first time and an hour a month after that. If you want to see first what Google can see of your site from the outside, start with our free website audit. If you want the sorted lists from your own GSC data, with the pages and titles to change in order, the deep audit does it for you.

Notes. ¹ Google, “Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup” (the export button). ² Google, “Performance report (Search results): Troubleshooting data discrepancies” (1,000-row table, anonymized queries). ³ Google, “Performance report (Search results): Dimensions and data groupings” (data truncation and bulk data exports). ⁴ Google, “Performance report (Search results): Common tasks and use cases” (branded and non-branded queries filter, what counts as branded, availability; regular expressions in the query filter). ⁵ Google, “Performance report (Search results): Dimensions and data groupings” (the filter’s data history from March 2025; queries may be misclassified; no effect on ranking). ⁶ Google, “Performance report (Search results): Common tasks and use cases” (pages shown for a query; low click rate and what to change). Read on 26 October 2026.