Google’s John Mueller answers a question about discrepancies in Search Console query reports. John explains why the page and site level reports can report a different number of search queries than the Search Console Query report.
Discrepancies in Search Console query reports
The person asking the question wanted to confirm whether anonymous queries were the reason for the discrepancy in the reported search query data.
The man asked:
“In Search Console, when viewing the Pages report, I hit a page with 241 hits.
I hit the query report and the total number of queries is 148.
Are we attributing this to the anonymous query mentioned in the help center? “
Google’s John Mueller answers Search Console questions
John Mueller replied:
“Yes, that’s usually the case. So, especially when you look at the page level, we can show you all the information in Search Console.
That’s because there’s nothing unique about a single page request.
But when it comes to queries, some queries are very limited.
We don’t display these in Search Console.
This means that when you look at the report, on the one hand you will see a number at the top of the report that shows the total number of impressions or the total number of clicks. 30:40
You can also view individual impressions and clicks for each individual query.
Sometimes when you add up the tables, it doesn’t match.
This is mainly because we dropped those anonymous queries.
That’s the difference you’ll see there.
So in Search Console, if you look at it at the page level, you’ll see slightly different numbers for each query level.
At the query level, when you look at the table itself, you may see slightly different numbers than the summary at the top.
And from our point of view, if you want to look at individual queries, then query-level data is definitely useful.
However, if you want to see the full picture of site impressions, then you may want to look at page-level or site-level results and use that to track trends and changes over time. “
Anonymous query
Google doesn’t reveal some search queries that may contain “p”personal or sensitive information.“
Google’s Supporting documents It was not stated what kind of data was personal data or sensitive data.
Webmaster Help discussion topic Some say 90% of queries are anonymous, noting that many website queries include a person’s name. The discussion sheds light on a potentially anonymous query, a search query with a person’s name.
Google’s documentation states that queries containing personal or sensitive information are anonymous.
Google’s support page explains:
“Very rare queries (known as anonymous queries) are not shown in these results to protect the privacy of users who make queries.”
Elsewhere on the same Search Console support page, Google says the report may not track infrequent queries.
“For example, we may not track some queries that are infrequent or contain personal or sensitive information.”
Citation
Search Console’s Webmaster Support page
Why Search Console query reports don’t match
Watch John Mueller answer questions at 29:47 min
