Google hints that Voice search reporting coming to Google Search Console’s Search Analytics report

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller said on Friday in a Google hangout, at the 23-minute mark, that Google is looking for ways to show webmasters in the Google Search Console how people are finding their pages through voice search.

John explained that Google wants to provide a way to segment out how people search for your site using a keyboard versus voice search in the Search Analytics report. John said Google wants to “make it easier to pull out what people have used to search on voice and what people are using by typing. Similar to how we have desktop and mobile set up separately.”

John added that it is “tricky” because many of the voice searches are done in much longer-form sentences, and thus, by default, Google Search Analytics may not see enough volume for that query and group it together with the lower-volume keywords and not show it in the report. But he said they did have a discussion internally about how to go about separating out voice searches in that report.

Here is the Q&A I transcribed:

Q: Does Google plan to include Voice Search Search console reports in the future?

A: I don’t know what the exact plans are there, but we have discussed something like that. To kind of make it easier to pull out what people have used to search on voice and what people are using by typing. Similar to how we have desktop and mobile set up separately. I think some of that might be trickier because in practice, voice queries are more long-form; they’re more like sentences and real questions. And sometimes those exact queries don’t get used that often, so we might be filtering them out in search console. But it’s definitely something we’ve talked about. We’ve looked into different other types of queries or search results as well to see if there is something that we could be doing there differently. If you have any explicit examples of specifically how you think this type of feature, or any other feature in search console, could make it easier to really make high-quality websites, to really get some value out of search console in a way that makes sense for you to improve your service for users, then we’d really love to see those examples.

You can hear it yourself at the 23-minute mark.

John also added later, at the 26-minute mark, that Google also wants to segment out AMP results.

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.