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Comment by guelo

3 years ago

Isn't the search term in the Referer header?

Nope. They forward through an in-between that obscures it. They argue that because search results are personalized, being able to see the search terms can give you information about the visitor that can compromise their privacy. Google doesn't want anybody violating user privacy except for Google.

  • If you get your site setup on Google Webmaster tools you will still have access to the search terms. Definitely not as precise as with GA, but should suffice. Unless you want to do per user funnel tracking starting from their search term. Which is pretty privacy invasive.

    • You can only see visitor numbers per search term, but not information like bounce rates or duration of visits. And that would be really helpful to judge if people may get the wrong impression of your page and bounce if they searched for specific topics.

Not for many years. The only way to get Google search term data now is through the Search Console product, which integrates with GA.