Search performance

Search is the second part of SEO & GEO. It shows what people search for when they find your site: how often the site appeared in results (impressions), how often people clicked, and where it ranked, for every query and page. It reads Google Search Console and, optionally, Bing Webmaster Tools, and adds visits from search engines and AI assistants from Google Analytics.

This page explains every part of the screen, what each number means, the rules behind the flags, how syncing works and what the data can’t tell you. To connect the sources, see Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both are free.

Find it

Open SEO & GEO → Search in the left sidebar. Like the rest of Startica, it shows the product picked in the product switcher in the header.

Until Search Console or Bing is connected for the product, the screen shows “Connect Google Search Console” with a link to Settings → Products → Connections. While the first sync runs, it says “Reading Search Console: the first sync fetches 16 months and can take a minute.” If the last sync failed, the line under the range buttons says “Last sync failed:” and the error. See Troubleshooting.

The SEO & GEO Overview also has a Clicks from Google, 28 days card. See Overview card.

Google or Bing

When both Search Console and Bing are connected, a switch at the top picks Google or Bing and Copilot. With only one connected, the screen shows that one and there’s no switch. The two are never added together: Google and Bing report differently, so each has its own view. See The Bing view.

Ranges and comparison

The range buttons pick 7 days, 28 days (the default), 90 days or 12 months. Next to them, the screen says which days it shows, for example “2026-09-14 to 2026-10-11, compared with the 28 days before.”

• The range ends at the newest day with data, not at today. Search engines report with a delay, so ending at today would make the last days look empty.
• The comparison is the same number of days right before the range. Each tile and each query’s and page’s clicks show the change against it. On 12 months, the line says “compared with the 12 months before”.
• Only against a complete earlier period. Startica compares only when the stored data covers the whole earlier period. Otherwise the line says “(not enough older data to compare)” and no change figures appear. Search Console keeps 16 months, so 12 months usually has nothing to compare with, and right after you connect, longer ranges may not either.
• Recent days can still change. Startica reads Google’s freshest data, which Google calls preliminary and revises for a few days. Each sync re-reads the last 5 days, so the numbers settle on their own.

The tiles

Tile	What it means
Clicks	How many times someone clicked through to your site from a search result.
Impressions	How many times a link to your site appeared in someone’s results. A result counts when it’s on the page that was shown, even if the person didn’t scroll to it.
Click-through rate	Clicks divided by impressions.
Average position	The site’s average place in results, where 1 is the top result. Lower is better. It’s weighted by impressions: a day with 1,000 impressions counts ten times as much as a day with 100. Rows without a position (which Bing sometimes reports) are left out of the average, though their clicks and impressions still count.

Clicks, impressions and click-through rate show the change in percent. Average position shows the change in places, for example “-1.2”; going down is shown as an improvement, in green. A change under 0.5% (or under 0.05 places) says “no change”.

The chart

Clicks from Google (or from Bing) shows clicks per day across the range. Hover it to see a day’s value.

Queries

Queries lists what people searched for when your site appeared, sorted by clicks, then impressions. For each query: Clicks (with the change against the earlier period), Impressions, CTR and Position, all over the selected range. The list shows up to 100 queries for the selected filter, picked from the 500 with the most clicks. Changes show only when the earlier period can be compared.

Filters

Filter	Shows
All	Every query.
Non-brand	Queries that don’t mention the product. These are people finding you without knowing your name.
Brand	Queries that mention the product. They have a Brand badge.
Striking distance	Queries with the Striking distance flag.
Low click-through	Queries with the Low click-through flag.

Brand and non-brand

A query counts as brand when it contains one of these terms:

• the product’s name, as entered in Settings → Products;
• the first part of the product’s website address, without www.. For https://fieldnote.example, that’s fieldnote.

The term has to appear as whole words, written with or without spaces between them. Upper and lower case, punctuation and anything other than the letters a to z and digits don’t matter. For Fieldnote:

Query	Brand?
fieldnote	Yes
field note app	Yes: “field” and “note” together make “fieldnote”
Field-Note pricing	Yes
field notes app	No: “field notes” isn’t “fieldnote”
fieldnotes	No: not the same word

Terms shorter than 3 characters are ignored. You can’t add other brand terms yet.

Striking distance

Striking distance marks a query that ranks on the first or second page of results but not near the top, and is searched for often enough to matter. A better page or a better title could move it up, and on the first page a few places bring many more clicks. A query is flagged when, over the selected range:

• its average position is between 4.5 and 20 (the tooltip says “about 5 to 20”), and
• it has at least 3 impressions a day on average, with a minimum of 20: at least the larger of 20 and 3 × the number of days in the range.

Range	Impressions needed
7 days	21
28 days	84
90 days	270
12 months	1,095

Low click-through

Low click-through marks a query on the first page whose click-through rate is far below what that position usually gets. The title and description people see in results may not match what they want. A query is flagged when, over the selected range:

• its average position is 10 or better,
• it has at least twice the impressions striking distance needs (42 for 7 days, 168 for 28 days, 540 for 90 days, 2,190 for 12 months), and
• its click-through rate is under half of the rough rate Startica expects for that position:

Average position	Expected click-through rate	Flagged below
under 1.5	25%	12.5%
1.5 to under 2.5	14%	7%
2.5 to under 3.5	9%	4.5%
3.5 to under 5.5	6%	3%
5.5 to 10	3%	1.5%

These expected rates are a rough guide for a plain result, used only to point out titles and descriptions worth a second look. Real rates vary a lot by query and by what else is on the results page (ads, images, AI answers). A query can have both flags.

Hover a flag on the screen to see what it means.

Opportunities turns these flags into things to do, over the latest 28 days: non-brand queries in striking distance, with the clicks they’d get near the top, and pages with low click-through, with a title and description the AI can draft. It also lists pages that lost clicks.

Hidden queries

Google leaves rare queries out of the query list to protect searchers’ privacy: those that few people searched for over a few months. Their clicks and impressions still count in the tiles and the chart. When all the query rows Startica stored for the range add up to fewer clicks than the site’s total, the Queries card says so, for example: “Google hides rare queries for privacy, so 120 of the 1,040 clicks aren’t listed under any query.” The count uses every stored query, not only those listed on screen. The note is only in the Google view.

On a small site, hidden queries can be a large share of clicks. That’s normal.

Pages

Pages lists up to 50 pages people landed on from search, with the same columns as Queries. Each page links to the live page. Pages get the same Striking distance and Low click-through flags as queries, with the same rules, but no brand badge.

Countries and devices

Google view only. Clicks by country (top 8, as three-letter country codes such as USA and GBR) and by device (desktop, mobile, tablet), each with a bar for its share of the range’s clicks.

Sitemaps

Google view only. The sitemaps submitted in Search Console, as Search Console last read them, with the date Startica checked. For each: its address, how many pages it lists, when Google last read it (or “waiting for Google to read it”, or “not read yet”), and any errors and warnings. Errors are shown in red.

With none submitted, the card says “No sitemap submitted. Submit one in Search Console → Sitemaps so Google finds every page.” To check what your sitemap contains, see Site health.

Visits from search and AI assistants

This card comes from your web analytics, not from Search Console or Bing, and needs GA4 or Umami connected. Its description names the source: “From Google Analytics: …” or “From Umami: …”. When both are connected and working, it uses GA4. It counts sessions (Umami: visits) on your site over the same days as the selected range:

Column	What it counts
Organic search	Sessions with the medium organic: visits from a search engine’s results. GA4 sets the medium itself; for Umami, Startica gives it to visits whose referrer is a search engine. Below the total, the top 5 sources, such as google, bing or duckduckgo.
AI assistants	Sessions that came from an AI assistant’s link, with a line per assistant.

A session counts as an AI assistant visit when either:

• its source is a known assistant’s address. The card says when the list was last checked (2026-10-12):

  Assistant	Sources
  ChatGPT	chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com
  Perplexity	perplexity.ai, www.perplexity.ai
  Claude	claude.ai
  Gemini	gemini.google.com, bard.google.com
  Copilot	copilot.microsoft.com, edgeservices.bing.com
  Meta AI	meta.ai, www.meta.ai
  Grok	grok.com
  DeepSeek	chat.deepseek.com, deepseek.com
  Mistral Le Chat	chat.mistral.ai
  You.com	you.com

• GA4 gave it the medium ai-assistant (GA4 only). Since May 2026, GA4 has an AI Assistant channel that tags visits from the assistants it knows this way. Such a visit from an assistant not in the list above shows under its source.

The address list covers visits from before GA4’s channel, and assistants GA4 doesn’t know. A visit counts once, as AI, even if its medium is something else.

Umami has no ai-assistant medium, so with Umami only the referrer’s address counts. A visit that only carries utm_source=chatgpt.com, with no referrer, counts as direct, not as AI.

Things to know:

• Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are organic. Visits from links in Google’s AI answers arrive from google as organic search, so they’re in Organic search, not AI assistants. Bing’s Copilot in search results usually arrives as bing organic too.
• Only visits with a link count. An assistant that mentions your product without a link, or a person who reads an answer and then types your address, isn’t counted here. AI visibility checks the answers themselves.
• Analytics history starts when you connected it. Each GA4 or Umami sync reads the last 30 days, so a 90-day or 12-month range only covers what has been synced since then, plus the 30 days before you connected.

The Analytics page shows the same counts for its last 30 days.

The Bing view

With Bing connected, pick Bing and Copilot. It works like the Google view, with these differences:

• Bing and Copilot together. Bing reports clicks and impressions from Bing search and Copilot as one number and doesn’t split them. The screen says: “Bing combines Bing search and Copilot. Daily totals update every day; queries and pages are weekly, so short ranges may show none.”
• Daily totals, weekly queries and pages. The tiles and chart use Bing’s daily totals. Bing updates its query and page lists once a week, with one row per week, so the 7 days range may show no queries or pages.
• No average position for the site. Bing’s daily totals don’t include a position, so the Average position tile shows a dash. Queries and pages have positions. When Bing has no position for a week, that week is left out of the query’s average position (its clicks and impressions still count), and a query with no known position at all shows a dash.
• No hidden-queries note. Bing’s query rows are weekly and its totals daily, so the two don’t add up and the screen doesn’t compare them.
• No countries, devices or sitemaps. Those cards are only in the Google view.

The flags and brand rule are the same as for Google.

Overview card

The SEO & GEO Overview has a Clicks from Google, 28 days card, next to Site health, Problems to fix and AI search access. It shows clicks over the latest 28 days of Search Console data, and below it the impressions, the average position and the change in clicks against the 28 days before, for example “3,120 impressions · position 7.4 · +12% clicks”. The change only shows when the stored data covers those earlier 28 days. Click it to open Search.

When Search Console is connected but the first sync hasn’t finished, it shows a dash and “Search Console is connected; numbers appear after the first sync.” Without a Search Console connection it shows a dash and Connect Search Console. Both open Search. The card uses Google data only, and it’s on the Overview only once the product has a site.

How syncing works

Search data syncs as part of the daily metrics sync (metrics_sync), together with GA4, Umami, Stripe and the product database. There’s no separate job.

When	What happens
When you save the connection	Startica first checks that the key can read the property or site, and shows any problem in the dialog without saving. Then it saves and syncs right away. The card shows Checking…, then Connected or Error.
The first sync	Search Console: the last 16 months, everything Google keeps, read a month at a time, newest month first. Bing: everything Bing returns, up to 16 months. This can take a minute.
Every day at 08:15	Each later sync reads from the newest stored day, or from 5 days ago if that’s earlier. Google revises recent days, so they’re read again and overwritten. For Bing, rows from 14 days before that are kept, because Bing’s weekly rows change for a while.
Sync now	In Settings → Products → Connections, syncs all of the product’s connections.

Scheduled syncs only run while Startica is open. If it’s closed at 08:15, that day’s sync is skipped; the next sync catches up, since it starts from the newest stored day. See Running in the background.

Search Console’s own data is about two to three days behind for final numbers. Startica asks for the freshest data Google has, so the last day or two are often there but partial.

What Startica reads

From Search Console, for each day: totals for the site, and clicks, impressions and position for each query, page, country and device. Each is stored on its own: you can see a query’s clicks or a page’s clicks, but not which pages a query led to. Only web search results are read, not Google Images, Video, News or Discover.

Startica reads in windows of up to 31 days, newest first, 25,000 rows at a time. To keep a very large site from stalling the app, it reads at most 200,000 rows per breakdown (query, page, country, device) for each window. Google also only exports the top rows for a site: about 50,000 per day. So on very large sites, the long tail of queries and pages can be incomplete; the site totals are always complete, and the newest days are never the ones cut.

From Bing: daily clicks and impressions, and weekly clicks, impressions and position for top queries and pages.

All of it is stored in Startica’s local database on your computer. See Privacy and security.

Limits

Not available	Why
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode separately	Google counts searches in AI Overviews and AI Mode in the normal web totals. Search Console’s Generative AI performance report has them on their own, but it has no API, so Startica can’t read it. The screen says: “Google counts searches in AI Overviews and AI Mode in these numbers; its API doesn’t report them separately.”
Bing search and Copilot separately	Bing reports them together.
Citations in Copilot and Bing’s AI answers	Bing’s AI Performance report has no API.
Bing queries and pages day by day	Bing updates them weekly.
Bing countries, devices and sitemaps	Startica doesn’t read them from Bing.
Which pages a query led to	Queries and pages are stored separately.
Rankings for queries you don’t appear for	Search Console and Bing only report searches where your site was shown.
More than 16 months	Search Console keeps 16 months.

Whether AI assistants mention and recommend your product, with or without a link, is what AI visibility measures.

In the demo

In demo mode, Search shows 90 days of sample Search Console data for fieldnote.example (property sc-domain:fieldnote.example, using the GA4 key): growing clicks, two brand queries (fieldnote and fieldnote app), queries and pages in striking distance, a query and a page with low click-through, hidden queries, five countries, three devices and one sitemap. Visits from search and AI assistants shows sample GA4 visits from Google and Bing organic search, and from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. There’s no Bing data in the demo, and nothing syncs.

The demo has 90 days of search data and 30 days of GA4 data, so 12 months shows 90 days, and 90 days and 12 months say “(not enough older data to compare)”. 7 days and 28 days have comparisons.

Related

• Google Search Console: connect Search Console
• Bing Webmaster Tools: connect Bing
• SEO & GEO
• Site health
• AI visibility
• Opportunities: what to do about the flagged queries and pages
• Analytics