In April 2025, anonymized queries made up 46.77% of web site visitors. That is knowledge from earlier than AI Overviews have been launched. Queries are longer now and I believe that extra queries are being anonymized.
This quantity is barely greater than our 2022 research on anonymized queries. Nonetheless, that’s the common. Some web sites in our analysis noticed dramatically greater percentages of anonymized queries.
Learn on to see the way it would possibly impression you.
The issue is that I imagine Google’s classification for anonymized queries is overly broad. Right here’s how Google defines anonymized queries:
Some queries (referred to as anonymized queries) aren’t included in Search Console knowledge to guard the privateness of the person making the question.Anonymized queries are those who aren’t issued by various dozen customers over a two-to-three month interval.
A number of dozen customers must seek for one thing over a two-to-three-month interval or Google received’t inform you what was searched.
There was the same definition used round Google’s obligations below the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) the place they’re imagined to share knowledge with rivals. For that, they categorised nameless queries as queries that haven’t been searched greater than 30 instances within the final 13 months by 30 separate signed-in customers. DuckDuckGo’s CEO mentioned that omitted ~99% of longtail queries.
That methodology truly provides extra knowledge than the methodology utilized by Google Search Console to inform you what drove clicks to your personal web site. That signifies that greater than 99% of longtail queries could be omitted by Google Search Console.
Tip
It’s going to worsen. I had our superb knowledge scientist Xibeijia Guan pull knowledge for April 2025, earlier than the rollout of AI Overviews or AI Mode. 46.77% nameless in April 2025 was solely barely worse than the 46.08% nameless we noticed in 2022.
That’s not the top of the story. Search habits is altering within the period of AI search. Individuals are actually looking out with longer queries.
Actually, Google eliminated the max phrase rely on Google searches. Prior to now, Google would solely use the primary 32 phrases in your question. Now, the search solely breaks when the max characters within the URL are reached, someplace between 2,083 characters to a number of megabytes of information, relying on the browser.
Searches are getting longer, and Google anonymizes queries not searched by a number of dozen customers over a two-to-three-month interval. You possibly can see the place that is going.
That nameless question quantity goes to skyrocket. We’re going to have much less knowledge than ever on what folks searched to return to our personal web sites.
We’ll quickly be pulling the information to point out how way more is being anonymized, however for now, benefit from the nerdy knowledge from the research.
We analyzed 22 billion clicks throughout 887,534 GSC properties. That is up from the 9 billion clicks we checked out throughout 146,741 properties in 2022.
Right here’s how nameless queries have trended:
- 46.08% in 2022
- 45.02% in April 2024
- 46.77% in April 2025
Under is a histogram displaying the breakdown of anonymized queries by the variety of web sites.
The mode, or most frequent share of anonymized queries for a website, falls between 45% and 80%. That signifies that many websites are lacking greater than the 46.77% common would have you ever imagine. 
If we take a look at the breakdown of web sites by visitors, there’s an fascinating phenomenon. Websites with common visitors even have extra knowledge.
Websites with decrease visitors and websites with greater visitors appear to be lacking extra knowledge. These websites seemingly have extra long-tail or area of interest/proprietary phrases which might be extra prone to be anonymized than different websites. 
In case you’re seeing field plots for the primary time, right here’s how it’s best to learn them:
Last ideas
As I mentioned, I anticipate extra knowledge to fall into this anonymized question bucket with AIOs and AI Mode. We’ll have the information for you quickly. Keep tuned.
