Every search on your site is a visitor telling you, in their own words, what they came for. The Tracksies > Fetchie > Insights tab collects those words into something you can act on. Most useful of all is the list of things people looked for and couldn’t find.
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Picking a Period
Three buttons at the top switch the trailing window: Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days. The 30-day view is the default. Everything on the tab reflects the chosen window.
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Total Searches
The headline number: how many searches visitors ran in the period. A steady rise here usually means more traffic; a sudden spike is worth a glance at the top searches to see what everyone suddenly wants.
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Top Searches
The most-searched queries, each with two numbers:
- Searches: how many times it was searched
- Avg results: how many results it found, on average
The combination is the useful part. A popular search with healthy results is your content working. A popular search averaging one or two results is a topic your visitors care about more than your site currently does. That’s a strong hint about what to write, stock, or link more prominently.
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Searches That Found Nothing
What people looked for and couldn’t find: your content gap list.
This is the most valuable table on the page. Every row is demand you already have and content you don’t. Common patterns and what they suggest:
- A product or topic you don’t cover. The clearest possible “should we?” signal, straight from visitors.
- A synonym you don’t use. Visitors say “returns”, your page says “refund policy”. The content exists, but the words don’t match. Adding the visitor’s word to the page fixes it.
- Typos and half-typed words. When a search finds nothing, Fetchie’s Did you mean shows results for the closest word on your site, but the original search still appears here, so you see the words visitors type. The Broad strictness mode in Search settings matches words that start with what was typed, so “hood” finds “hoodie” and “shoe” finds “shoes”, which can shrink this list. It doesn’t work the other way: “shoes” won’t find “shoe”.
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What’s Counted (and What Isn’t)
A few deliberate choices keep the numbers honest:
- Your own searches aren’t logged. Searches by logged-in administrators are excluded, so testing and day-to-day admin work never pollute the data
- Known bots aren’t logged. Search engines, SEO tools, uptime monitors, link previews and scripts that say what they are, and requests with no browser identification at all, are left out
- Paging isn’t searching. A visitor clicking through to page two of the same results counts as one search, not two
- Only real queries are logged. A search that’s empty once cleaned up (only filler words, single characters) isn’t recorded
If the tab says “No searches logged yet”, that’s the quiet truth: data appears once visitors start searching.
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Odd-Looking Searches
Some entries in your log won’t look like anything a person would type, like index think app invokefunction. Those are almost always bots. Some bots pretend to be an ordinary browser, and because Fetchie records nothing about who searched, it has no way to tell them apart from a visitor. Sites that run an anti-spam plugin still see them.
Anti-spam plugins that check WordPress’s own search form now check Fetchie’s search forms too. Bots that skip the form and request the search address directly aren’t stopped by a form check, so some will still reach your log.
What they tend to look like:
- Code-like strings aimed at other software.
index think app invokefunctionis a probe for a weakness in a PHP framework that isn’t WordPress - Nonsense searched once and never again
Fetchie keeps only the words, and shows them as plain text everywhere they appear, on this tab and in the digest email.
There’s no button to remove a single entry. Bot searches drop out on their own once they pass the age you’ve set under Keep entries for. When you read the lists, skip anything searched once that no person would type. A developer can add more bot names to Fetchie’s list with the fetchie_bot_user_agents filter.
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What’s Stored, and For How Long
Each logged search stores the cleaned-up search words, how many results it found, which strictness mode was active, and the date. Nothing about the visitor: no account, no address, no browser details. Ever.
Visitors may type personal information into a search box, so the log is also retention-capped: entries older than your chosen period (30, 90 or 365 days, set under Keep entries for further down this same tab) are deleted automatically each day. We don’t know what your local laws and regulations require, but we hope to give you the tools to make it easier. The full detail lives on the Privacy page.
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The Same Numbers, Delivered to You
You don’t have to remember to visit the tab:
- The digest email, once you switch it on, sends the volume, top searches and content gaps to your inbox weekly, fortnightly or monthly
- The Fetchie this week widget on your WordPress dashboard shows the same week-at-a-glance numbers every time you log in
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Related
- Privacy: the search log in full detail
- The Search Digest Email: insights by email
- Search settings: strictness and results per page