As of April 2025, anonymized searches accounted for 46.77% of website traffic. This is data from before the introduction of AI Overviews. The queries are longer now and I suspect more queries are being anonymized.
This number is slightly higher than our 2022 study on anonymized queries. However, that is the average. Some websites in our research saw significantly higher percentages of anonymized searches.
Read on to find out how it could affect you.
The problem is that I believe Google’s classification for anonymized searches is too broad. This is how Google defines anonymized queries:
Some queries (called anonymized queries) are not included in Search Console data to protect the privacy of the user asking the query.Anonymized requests are those made by no more than a few dozen users over a period of two to three months.
A few dozen users have to search for something over a period of two to three months, otherwise Google won’t tell you what was searched.
A similar definition has been used for Google’s obligations under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires Google to share data with competitors. To do this, they classified anonymous search queries as search queries that were searched no more than 30 times by 30 different logged in users in the last 13 months. The CEO of DuckDuckGo said that about 99% of long-tail requests were left out.
This method actually provides more data than the method used by Google Search Console to tell you what drove clicks to your own website. This means that more than 99% of long-tail queries would be left out of Google Search Console.
Tip
It’s going to get worse. I had our amazing data scientist Xibeijia Guan pull data for April 2025, before the launch of AI Overviews or AI Mode. 46.77% anonymity in April 2025 was only slightly worse than the 46.08% anonymity we saw in 2022.
That’s not the end of the story. Search behavior is changing in the age of AI search. People are now searching with longer search queries.
In fact, Google has removed the maximum word count in Google searches. In the past, Google only used the first 32 words in your search query. Now the search only stops when the maximum number of characters in the URL is reached, which, depending on the browser, is between 2,083 characters and several megabytes of data.
Search queries are getting longer and longer and Google is anonymizing search queries that have not been searched by a few dozen users over a period of two to three months. You can see where this is going.
This anonymous query number will skyrocket. We will have less data than ever about what people searched to get to our own websites.
We’ll pull the data soon to show how much more anonymization is happening, but for now, enjoy the nerdy data from the study.
We analyzed 22 billion clicks on 887,534 GSC properties. This is an increase from the 9 billion clicks we examined across 146,741 properties in 2022.
This is how anonymous queries have evolved:
- 46.08% in 2022
- 45.02% in April 2024
- 46.77% in April 2025
Below you can see a histogram showing the breakdown of anonymized queries by number of sites.
The mode or most common percentage of anonymized requests for a website is between 45% and 80%. This means that many sites are missing more data than the 46.77% average suggests. 
When we look at the breakdown of websites by traffic, there is an interesting phenomenon. Websites with average traffic actually have more data.
Lower traffic sites and higher traffic sites appear to be missing more data. These sites are likely to use more long-tail or niche/proprietary terms that are more likely to be anonymized than other sites. 
If this is your first time seeing boxplots, here’s how to read them:
Final thoughts
As I said, I expect that with AIOs and AI mode, more data will fall into this anonymized query range. We’ll have the data for you soon. Stay tuned.
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