March 16, 2026 •

Search Console now includes filters to show only branded queries or exclude them.

Google uses AI to classify queries, and notes that it can make mistakes. Branded queries include:

Name of company or site,

Domain,

Brand-specific products and services, including common misspellings.

The feature makes query filtering easier but adds no new functionality. Query filters had included brand names via regular expressions and AI prompts .

In my testing, the new filter produced brand-name variations, such as:

One word and two,

Hyphenated,

Abbreviated,

Misspellings.

The filter correctly included the names of products and of human representatives, though it skipped quite a few branded items that it evidently didn’t recognize. For example, it identified a founder’s name as a branded query but not the title of the founder’s book.

It also included queries for unrelated executives and products, as well as for competitor names and clients’ case studies.…