A branded search is a query that includes your business or product name, such as your company name plus reviews, opening hours or a product. Non-branded searches are everything else. Branded traffic measures whether people already know you; non-branded traffic measures whether search is finding you new customers. Reporting them together hides both answers.
Why the split matters
A site can show growing search traffic while its SEO is going nowhere, because a radio campaign or a busy season is sending people to search the name. It can also show flat traffic while SEO is working, because a competitor's brand campaign is fading. Only the non-branded line answers the question SEO is meant to answer: are strangers finding us?
Branded queries also behave differently. Click rates are very high, positions are almost always first, and losing them to anyone is a serious problem worth an immediate look.
How to split them
In Search Console, filter queries to those containing your name and its common misspellings, then to those not containing it. Save both views. Report non-branded clicks and impressions as the SEO number, and branded clicks as a brand awareness number that the rest of the marketing gets credit for.
In rank tracking, track a handful of branded terms so that a sudden loss shows up, and keep them in a separate group so they do not flatter the average position of the terms that matter.
Your brand in page titles
Google's guidance suggests including the site name at the start or end of each title, separated by a hyphen, colon or pipe, and its results also show a site name on its own line beneath the title. The practical position is to keep the brand short and at the end, so that the words describing the page come first and are not the ones truncated. Whether to drop it entirely on pages competing for tight non-branded queries is a test worth running on your own pages, not a rule either way.
What branded search tells you about AI
When assistants begin recommending a business, people go and search its name to check it is real. A rise in branded searches with no matching campaign is one of the few external signs that AI visibility is turning into demand, and it is worth annotating when you see it.
Sources
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Title tag
The page title is the text in a page's title element, shown as the clickable headline in search results. Google uses it as the main source for that headline, along with the visible heading, link text and other prominent text, and will rewrite it when it judges the title unhelpful. A good title says specifically what the page is, in the words the searcher used, without padding.
CTR
Click-through rate is the share of people who saw your result and clicked it: clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage in Search Console. It falls steeply with position, so it only means anything when compared against the position it was earned at. Whether Google uses clicks to rank is a question with two honest halves, covered below.
Bottom-of-funnel keyword
A bottom-of-funnel keyword is a search typed by someone who has finished researching and is choosing a supplier: a service plus a place, a product plus a price, a brand versus another brand, near me, cost, quote, book. They are a small fraction of all searches and most of the revenue. For a small business they are the right place to start.
Exact match domain
An exact match domain is a domain name that matches a search phrase word for word, such as quietfireworks.com for the query quiet fireworks. Until 2012 the match alone helped such sites rank. Google then introduced a system to stop giving extra credit for it, and that system is still listed among Google's ranking systems today. The domain no longer ranks you. A good site on it still can.