Brand vs Non-Brand

What it measures

• Brand queries — searches that contain your brand name, common misspellings, or any term you've added to your brand dictionary.
• Non-brand queries — everything else: topical, informational, comparison, and category-level searches.
• For each bucket: queries, clicks, CTR, average position, and click share of the top-query set.

How we compute it

1. We pull the top queries for the selected window from Search Console.
2. Each query is matched against your brand terms — the site's configured brand keywords plus any entries in the brand dictionary — using case-insensitive substring matching.
3. Matching queries are bucketed as brand; the rest as non-brand.
4. Within each bucket we sum clicks and impressions, recompute CTR as a window total, and compute the impression-weighted average position.
5. Click share is each bucket's clicks divided by the total clicks of the top queries set, expressed as a percentage.

Tip: if the split looks off, refine your brand terms in Manage Site → Query Groups. Adding common misspellings and variants makes the split far more accurate.

Trailing 12-week trend

Beneath the headline split, the dashboard renders a stacked bar chart of clicks by week for the last 12 weeks — brand on the bottom (yellow), non-brand on top (blue). This adds the time dimension the headline split is missing: it lets you see whether your non-brand clicks (the true SEO signal) are trending up, flat or declining, and whether your overall growth is becoming more or less brand-dependent over time.

• Week boundary: ISO weeks (Monday–Sunday), aligned to the same weekday across the trailing 12-week window.
• Hover tooltip: shows the brand share for that specific week so you can spot weeks where brand spiked (campaign / PR) or where non-brand suddenly carried the load.
• What healthy looks like: a gently rising blue (non-brand) layer with a stable or modestly growing yellow (brand) layer underneath.
• What unhealthy looks like: total height growing because brand is expanding while non-brand is flat or shrinking — you're becoming more dependent on existing demand instead of capturing new demand.

Scenarios you'll see

What to do with it

1. Set a target non-brand share (e.g. > 50%) and track it month over month — it's the cleanest scoreboard for the SEO program.
2. Defend brand: monitor brand CTR and average position; investigate immediately if either drops.
3. Grow non-brand: prioritise Striking Distance, CTR Opportunities and Content Decay on non-brand queries for the highest leverage.
4. Reconcile with paid: if brand-search volume rises after a campaign, attribute correctly — the lift isn't an SEO win.
5. Revisit your brand dictionary quarterly. Misspellings, product names, and acronyms drift.

Caveats & limits

• The split is only as good as your brand terms. Common-word brands (e.g. Apple, Target) are inherently noisy and will over-report brand share.
• Search Console anonymises rare queries, so very long-tail brand variants may be missing entirely from the underlying data.
• This widget summarises the top queries for the window, not every query. For a full-grain split, use the Top Queries report with the brand query group filter.
• The 12-week trend chart classifies each unique query once with the current brand dictionary, then rolls clicks up by week. If you change brand terms, historical buckets will reclassify on the next refresh — that's by design.
• Substring matching can produce false positives if your brand name is a common word inside a longer query — tighten brand terms if you see this.