What visitors searched for and did not find
WordPress records nothing about your own search box. That is a waste: it is the only keyword data about your actual audience that costs nothing and is not an estimate. A search that comes back empty is a visitor telling you, in their own words, that a page is missing.
Two lists:
- Found nothing — ranked by how many people asked. One person searching once is noise; the same phrase forty times is a page you have not written. Each row offers to start that page, pre-titled.
- Barely found anything — one or two results. Often the page exists but does not use the words people are actually searching with, which is a smaller fix and an easy win.
Phrases are counted, not logged individually: "Blue Widgets", "blue widgets" and " BLUE WIDGETS " are one row with a count of three.
Crawlers are not recorded, and phrases are forgotten after 90 days by default. Search text is typed by visitors, and people paste things they did not mean to — keeping it forever is a liability with no analytical value, since a phrase last seen two years ago is not a content gap any more. You can change the retention or switch recording off entirely, and clear everything recorded so far. Nothing is ever sent off your site.