Skip to main content

Update to Google Analytics Search Engine List as of the 1st February

by Neil Goddard | 17.02.2012
If you’ve looked at your websites Google analytics data over the past 2 weeks you may have noticed some new search engines popping up that are driving traffic to your site (as of the 1st of February), in my case a search engine called ‘search-results’ is now sending a nice amount of traffic to the sites I monitor, you may also notice search engines such as conduit, avg, Babylon and rakuten (amongst a number of others).

Google analytics updated search engine list

Don’t get too excited, you aren’t suddenly just receiving traffic from a ton of new search engines, but it does beg the question why am I now seeing traffic from these new search engines?

As of the 1st of February Google Analytics has changed the way it displays traffic from some of the smaller search engines out there.  Previously smaller search engines that contained the word ‘search’ in their URL plus a query parameter “q” were all attributed under the search engine ‘search.com’ in Google Analytics, which resulted in inaccurate reporting of traffic from some of the bigger small search engines.  The Google analytics team are now adding these search engines to the default list in your organic search engine traffic report.

You should see a decrease in traffic from ‘search.com’ and an increase in the number of search engines sending traffic to your site as of February 1st.