Brand vs Non-brand Health
Splits every Search Console click into brand (searches that include your name or trademarked terms) and non-brand (everything else, i.e. true SEO discovery) — and trends each line over time. Non-brand decline is often the only signal that real demand is eroding while the headline number still looks healthy.
Why it matters
- Brand traffic measures the demand you've already created — PR, ads, word-of-mouth, returning users typing your name into Google.
- Non-brand traffic measures how much new demand you're capturing — the actual SEO scoreboard.
- A site can post flat total clicks while non-brand collapses 40% — the brand line masks the problem until a quarterly review goes badly. Watching the split exposes that drift early.
How it's built
- For each managed site we build a brand matcher from the site's brand terms (configured in Site Settings → Brand). The matcher tokenises and lowercases each query and looks for any brand token, including common misspellings if you've added them.
- Every query in the date window is bucketed exactly once: brand if the matcher fires, non-brand otherwise.
- We then aggregate clicks, impressions, CTR and average position per bucket per day so the chart and KPI strip can render trends and totals.
How to read it
- Healthy growth shows both lines rising, with non-brand growing faster than brand.
- Brand up, non-brand flat/down usually means a marketing push (ads, PR, podcast) is filling the gap left by losing organic discovery — a warning sign for the SEO program.
- Both lines dropping alongside a Google update typically means a site-wide algorithmic hit — pair with SERP Volatility for confirmation.
- The brand share % is a useful long-running KPI: most B2B SaaS sites sit at 30–60% brand; going significantly above that range usually means the SEO funnel has stopped working.
Data requirements
- GSC Performance daily data for the selected window.
- Brand terms configured for the site (the matcher is empty without them, so everything ends up as non-brand).