Google Search Console adds regular expression support and more data filtering to Performance reports

Google announced a couple improvements to the Google Search Console performance reports this morning. The improvements include support for regular expressions within the filters of the performance reports and also the comparison mode has improved its data filtering.

Regular expressions. We’ve been expecting Google Search Console to support regular expressions for the past year or so and now it is here. Regular expressions, also known as regex, is a way to do advanced search and replace for strings of words or characters.

In the performance report, you can find it under a query or page filter, select the dropdown menu and select “Custom.” This will let you create more complex query and page based filters.

The example Google provided was “let’s say your company is called ‘cats and dogs’ but is sometimes also abbreviated as ‘cats & dogs’ or even ‘c&d’. You can use a regex filter to capture all of your branded queries by defining the regex filter: cats and dogs|cats & dogs|c&d“

Here is what it looks like:

Improved data filtering in comparison mode. Google also has improved the data filtering within the comparison mode to “fully supports cases where more than a single metric is selected.” Google also said it made it easier to view those results side-by-side, leading to “almost doubling the area available for the data table,” Google said.

Regex support is also available in the comparison mode for queries and pages filters.

Here is what it looks like:

Why we care. We now have more ways to slice and dice the performance report in Google Search Console. From the addition of regex support and now to the improvements in the comparison report data filtering, you can dig even deeper into your Google Search organic traffic data.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.