Querylitics is an SEO analytics tool that stores your complete Google Search Console data in BigQuery, so your reporting is never subject to the row caps and retention limits of the GSC interface. This guide covers the core concepts: why the bypass matters, how to slice your data with keyword tags and URL segments, when to reach for a Basic versus a Smart report, and how to read the drill-down visualizations.

The two ceilings

Google Search Console caps its reporting at roughly 1,000 rows per query and retains only about 16 months of history. For any site with real traffic, those two limits quietly turn long-term analysis into guesswork.

The math breaks visibly: filter a site's clicks by one keyword and GSC might report 20,000; filter by everything except that keyword and it reports 71,000 — against 240,000 total clicks. The missing 149,000 aren't lost traffic, they're rows truncated out of the report. And anything older than the retention window is permanently gone from Google's side.

What Querylitics does differently

Querylitics pulls raw query and page data straight from the GSC API and stores every row in BigQuery, keyed to your property. No row cap applies on the way in, and nothing ages out: once a day of data has been ingested it stays queryable indefinitely, so reports can span years instead of months.

How data gets in

• Initial backfill — the moment a property is linked, Querylitics backfills GSC's full retained window (about 16 months). Progress is shown on the property while it runs.
• Daily sync — every day, the most recent five days are re-ingested for every property. The five-day window absorbs Search Console's 2–3 day processing lag, and interrupted backfills are resumed here automatically.

Each row captures date, query, page, clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. From the day a property is linked, its history only accumulates.

Tags and segments are reusable filters: build them once per property and every report can apply them. They're shared with everyone in your organization and they're never destructive — a filter changes what a report aggregates, not the underlying data.

Keyword tags

Keyword tags filter rows by the search query users typed into Google. A tag is a named bundle of phrases, and each phrase has a mode:

• contains — the query must include the phrase (case-insensitive).
• excludes — the query must not include the phrase.
• regex — the query must match the regular expression, e.g. seo.*(minnesota|mn).

A tag with several phrases requires all of them to hold at once. To express "any of these", save separate tags and combine them with OR when you run the report.

URL segments

Segments filter rows by the page that ranked. A segment holds explicit URLs — picked straight from your sitemap — and/or pattern rules:

• contains / excludes — the page URL does (or doesn't) include the text, e.g. /blog.
• equals / not_equals — exact match (or exact non-match) against the full URL.
• regex — the URL matches a regular expression.

Within one segment, explicit URLs are OR'd (any listed URL qualifies), patterns are AND'd (every rule must hold), and the two groups are OR'd against each other.

Managing filters

Everything lives in the dashboard's Filters section: create keyword tags and URL segments in their dialogs, edit or delete existing ones, and click any pill to select it for the next report — blue pills are keyword tags, orange pills are URL segments.

A Basic report aggregates one property over a date window with your selected filters and a single layer of AND/OR logic. It's quick to set up, easy to reason about, and the right choice for most questions.

Running one

1. Pick the property you want to analyze.
2. Set the start and end dates — the form defaults to the property's ingested coverage.
3. Click the tag and segment pills you want to apply.
4. Set the three OR/AND toggles (below).
5. Run it — the report lands at the top of the My Reports table.

The three logic toggles

• Tag logic — must a row match all selected tags (AND) or any of them (OR)?
• Segment logic — the same choice for the selected segments.
• Cross-filter logic — must a row satisfy the tags and the segments, or is either side enough?

The filters and logic are stored with the report, so opening it later reconstructs exactly the same question.

My Reports

Every run is saved to the My Reports table, where reports can be renamed, sorted by any column, and reopened at any time. Each row carries its type badge, date window, applied filters, and the headline metrics — clicks, impressions, ratio, CTR, and average position. Ratio and CTR are the same quantity shown at different precision.

Smart reports replace the single global operators with a logic cascade per filter type — for questions a Basic report can't express, like (Brand OR Products) AND Location on tags combined with (/blog OR /services) on segments.

The cascade builder

Each cascade is built out of rows. Filters placed side by side within a row form an OR block — at least one of them must match. Rows stacked on top of each other are AND'd — every row must hold. Keyword tags and URL segments each get their own cascade, and a cross-filter operator decides how the two combine.

Read top to bottom: a cascade with the row Brand, Products above the row Location means (Brand OR Products) AND Location.

Basic or Smart?

Reach for Basic when one global AND/OR answers the question — that covers most reports. Reach for Smart when different filters need different operators: "branded queries on service pages, but not on the blog". Smart runs land in the same My Reports table wearing the purple badge.

Click any row in My Reports to open its drill-down: the report details and four charts, with a sticky summary bar pinned beneath the header while you scroll — the report's type, name, date window, filters, and its five headline metrics stay in view the whole time. Close it with the X to return to the table.

Report details

The detail table breaks the report into individual query + page rows with their own clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. Sort any column, filter the Query and Page columns by text, page through the results, and export the current view to CSV or send it to Google Sheets.

Aggregate totals are computed when the report runs; the drill-down recomputes live from the stored filters. If a window's final days were still inside Search Console's processing lag when you ran it, the details may pick up late-arriving rows.

The four charts

• Performance Over Time — clicks and impressions across the report window; metric toggles, range presets, and a timeline slider zoom into any sub-range without re-running the report.
• Keyword Cloud — the report's dominant queries at a glance, weighted by performance.
• Query Treemap — each query's share of the report's traffic as proportional tiles.
• Top URLs — the pages that captured the traffic.

All four respect the report's filters and logic, and re-theme with light and dark mode.