Google Analytics Keyword Not Provided: See Searches per Company

If you have ever opened a keyword report and found "(not provided)" where the search terms should be, you have met Google Analytics keyword not provided. The short answer is that Google stopped passing search terms to websites between 2011 and 2013, and no tool can recover the exact query behind a single visit. What you can do is attribute likely queries to the companies that visit you, as long as you treat the result as a probability rather than a fact.

Why does Google Analytics say "(not provided)"?

Because Google encrypted search. When a search results page is served over HTTPS, the search term is no longer passed to the website the searcher clicks through to.

This happened in two stages. In October 2011 Google moved signed-in users to secure search, and by September 2013 secure search covered everyone.¹² The Inside GOV.UK blog recorded the effect on 25 September 2013: on the previous day, "(not provided)" accounted for 79% of visits from Google search to GOV.UK.¹ Loves Data summarises the mechanism simply: once the keyword was hidden, it "was no longer sent through to the website that someone was visiting from the search results".²

Avinash Kaushik, writing on 21 October 2013, described the same change: queries from logged-in users were encrypted and "kept from being passed on to websites the users visits after seeing search results".³

More than a decade later, nothing has reversed this. GA4 does not show the organic search term for an individual session, and neither does any other analytics package. Any tool that claims to show you "the exact keyword this visitor typed" into Google should be asked how.

What can Search Console tell you instead?

Google Search Console is the official replacement, but it answers a different question. Its Performance report shows how your site performs in Google Search: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, grouped by query, page, country, device, search appearance and date.⁴

That is valuable, but it is aggregate data. It tells you that a page received 40 clicks from a query on a given day. It never tells you who those 40 people were. Google is also explicit about the limits:

• Privacy filtering. "To protect user privacy, the Performance report doesn't show all data," including some queries made a very small number of times.⁵
• Delay. Data typically becomes available within two to three days.⁵
• Row limits. The interface shows a maximum of 1,000 rows, although the API gives access to more.⁵

Does GA4 show keywords at all?

Only if you link Search Console to it, and even then only in aggregate. Linking adds two reports to GA4: Google Organic Search Queries and Google Organic Search Traffic.⁶ Google's help notes that Search Console metrics are only compatible with Search Console dimensions and a small set of Analytics dimensions: landing page, device and country.⁶ You cannot break the query data down by user, session or any identity you hold in GA4.

In practice, the most useful view is landing page by query. It tells you which searches send people to which pages, which is the starting point for the next step.

Can you connect a search query to a company?

Not with certainty, but you can make a reasonable, clearly labelled inference.

The logic is straightforward. If you can identify the company behind a visit (from its IP address and network data), you know three things about that visit: the company, the page it landed on and the date. Search Console tells you which queries sent clicks to that page on that date. Where those line up, the query is a candidate explanation for the visit.

How much weight the pairing deserves depends on how tightly the pieces fit:

• Landing page. A visit that entered on the same page the query sent clicks to is a candidate. A visit that entered elsewhere is not.
• Time. A visit on the same day as the query's clicks is a closer fit than one two or three days away.
• Query share. If one query accounts for most of a page's clicks that day, it is a stronger candidate than if twenty queries shared the clicks evenly.
• Visit source. An organic search referral on the visit makes the pairing more plausible than a direct or email visit.

None of these turns an inference into a fact. Two companies might land on the same page on the same day from different searches. Which is why the honest way to present this is as a likely connection with a confidence attached, and as one signal among several rather than a headline.

Scout works this way. When you connect Search Console, Scout pairs queries with identified companies by overlap on landing page and time window, and shows a confidence for each pairing. The in-app wording is deliberate: Scout says it infers a query, with a percentage, and never claims a company "arrived via" a search. A Search Console match also adds to the company's confidence score when present, and search demand is one input to Scout's lead score from 0 to 100.

A worked example (illustrative)

The following is a made-up example with fictional names, to show the reasoning.

Northfield Castings Ltd, a fictional engineering firm, is identified visiting your site on a Tuesday. The visit comes from Northfield's corporate network and enters on your guide to tolerances for aluminium die casting. It reads that guide, then your case studies, then your contact page.

In Search Console, that guide received 25 clicks on the Tuesday. One query, "aluminium die casting tolerances uk", accounted for 20 of them, which is 80% of that page's clicks that day. The other five clicks came from a scatter of long-tail queries.

A sensible reading is: Northfield probably arrived from a search for aluminium die casting tolerances. It is not certain, because Northfield could have been one of the five long-tail clicks, or could have arrived from a bookmark. But it is a far better starting point than "(not provided)".

What you do with that is the next question.

What else fills the keyword gap?

Search Console is the main source, but not the only one. Kaushik's 2013 list of alternatives is still a good checklist.³

• Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing reports keywords and URLs for web search in its performance report.⁷ It covers searches that Google's tools never see.
• Paid search terms. Google Ads still shows the search terms that triggered your ads.² Paid terms are a good proxy for the intent behind organic traffic to the same topic.
• On-site search. What people type into your own search box is first-party data about their intent.³
• Landing page analysis. Judge organic traffic by the pages people land on rather than the words they typed.¹³
• UTM discipline. Tag every campaign link consistently, so that email, social and partner traffic never gets confused with organic search.

For a broader view of free and paid ways to see who is visiting, read how to see which companies visit your website.

What you must not do with search attribution

Do not tell a prospect what they searched for. "I noticed you searched for aluminium die casting tolerances" is wrong on two counts: it may not be true, because the attribution is probabilistic, and even when it is true it reads as surveillance.

Use the inference to choose what you lead with. If Northfield probably searched for tolerances, your follow-up might open with a short note on tolerances for their kind of part, a relevant case study, or an offer to review a drawing. The prospect experiences helpful relevance, not a report on their browsing.

The same principle applies across all visitor data. Our guide on how to follow up with companies that visited your website covers the wording in more detail, and our guide to visitor identification and UK GDPR covers the legal side (general information, not legal advice).

See which searches brought which companies

The keywords did not come back, but the question behind them can be partly answered. Connect Search Console to Scout and you can see the queries likely associated with each identified company, each with a confidence you can judge for yourself. Plans are measured in identified visits per month; see pricing for details. Start a 14-day free trial, no card needed, and connect Search Console to see which searches brought which companies.

Frequently asked questions

Is there any tool that shows the exact keyword each visitor searched?

No. Google has withheld organic search terms from destination websites since secure search was rolled out between 2011 and 2013. Tools can infer a likely query from Search Console data, but any claim of exact per-visitor keywords should be treated with suspicion.

Does GA4 show organic keywords at all?

Only once you link Search Console. GA4 then adds Google Organic Search Queries and Google Organic Search Traffic reports, which show aggregate queries by landing page, device and country, not by user or session.

Is Search Console data delayed?

Yes. Google says data typically becomes available within two to three days, and the newest figures can be preliminary. GA4's Search Console reports need about 48 hours after collection.

Why are some queries missing from Search Console?

Google filters some queries to protect privacy, such as those made a very small number of times or containing personal or sensitive information. The interface also shows at most 1,000 rows, although the API can return more.

Sources

1. Inside GOV.UK: Lost for words: Google stops providing keywords insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk
2. Loves Data: (Not Provided) keywords lovesdata.com
3. Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik: Search: Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options, the Future kaushik.net
4. Google Search Console Help: Performance report (Search results) support.google.com
5. Google Search Console Help: About Search Console data support.google.com
6. Google Analytics Help: Search Console integration support.google.com
7. Bing Webmaster Blog: Unlocking insights with the new Bing Webmaster Tools Performance Report blogs.bing.com