Analytics separates traffic that arrives at your site through a search engine result from traffic that arrives through other referring channels, like paid advertisement or another site that links to yours. In your reports, this traffic segment is called organic search traffic. For information on traffic types, read about traffic sources.
Analytics automatically recognizes the most popular search engines, and attributes traffic to these sources. Traffic that finds your site through any of the default search engines appears as organic search traffic in your reports. Traffic that finds your site through any search engine not included in this list is considered referral traffic, (not as organic search traffic), in your reports.
You can add, delete, and reorder the list of recognized search engines to modify how organic search traffic is attributed in your account and how the data appears in your reports.
In this article:How the list of search engines affects your data
Analytics attributes incoming traffic to one source. Organic search traffic is assigned to the first search engine on your list that matches the domain name and query parameter (optional) of the incoming user.
For example, if you list google.com first and images.google.com second (and both sites use the same query parameter, like q), all searches that happen on images.google.com are attributed to google.com. To change this attribution, you can reorder these search engines in the list to prioritize how sessions are attributed. In this example, you could list images.google.com before google.com so searches are properly attributed.
You can also remove search engines from this list. Traffic arriving from any search engine you remove appear as referral traffic instead of as organic search traffic.
If you control a search engine that overlaps with another in this list, and if they use the same query parameter, you could also avoid this situation by changing your search parameter to something unique.
Change your organic search traffic settings
This setting is managed in the Admin settings of each property in your account. To add, edit, reorder, or remove search engines:
- Sign in to Analytics
- Click Admin, and select the account and property you want to edit.
- In the PROPERTY column, click Tracking Info > Organic Search Sources.
- Click +Add Search Engine.
- In the form, specify what the Domain Name Contains and the Query Parameter. Optionally, you can also specify a Query Parameter, a Search Engine Name, and what the Path Contains.
Chrome (v85 and beyond) by default no longer provides referrer-path or query-string information for external referrers (those outside the same domain). In order to properly classify custom organic search sources using Chrome (v85 and beyond), you can optionally leave the query parameter blank and Google Analytics will classify all referrals from those domains as ‘Organic Search’ sources.
- Click Create.
Click edit or delete to change or remove a search engine you’ve already added. To reorder the list, drag and drop the order of each row by using the mouse to grab the dots left of the search engine name.
Default-search-engine list
How to request inclusion in the default-search-engine list
If you would like us to add your search engine to the default-search-engine list or if you would like to make a change to your current listing, contact us at googleanalytics-channelgrouprequests@google.com. Google Analytics reviews these requests at least once per year and often more frequently. Inclusion is based on Google’s assessment of a number of factors including but not limited to whether a significant volume of traffic is sourced from a given search engine.
