Property Sampling: how much Search Console data the breakdowns hide

Property Sampling measures the gap between what Search Console counted for your property and what its query and page breakdowns can show. Google's daily totals include every click, but the query table leaves out anonymised searches and every breakdown is limited in rows, so the rows never add up to the total. This report sizes that gap per breakdown, per day and per date range, so you know how far to trust a query-level analysis.

How it is calculated

For the date range and filters you choose, AutoPSEO fetches three views of the same data:

1. Date totals: one row per day. These include all traffic and are always exact.
2. Query rows: up to 25,000 queries.
3. Page rows: up to 25,000 pages.

For each breakdown, hidden clicks = total clicks − the clicks its rows add up to, and % hidden divides that by the total. Impressions are treated the same way. The Sampling level is rated on hidden clicks, with stricter limits for pages because their breakdown normally loses far less:

The overall level is the worse of the two. When a breakdown returned the full 25,000 rows, the Row cap column says Reached: part of the gap is then the row limit rather than anonymisation, and a shorter range or a filter will show more.

Why the numbers never add up

Google gives two reasons, and they affect the breakdowns differently (performance data deep dive):

• Anonymised queries. Searches made by very few people, defined as not issued by more than a few dozen users over two to three months, are always left out of query tables to protect privacy, but are included in chart totals. This is why query data loses much more than page data, and why sites with a long tail of rare searches lose the most.
• Row limits. Search Console stores the top data rows rather than all of them (how data is collected), and the API returns the top rows of each request. On large sites, low-traffic pages fall outside.

Impressions follow a third rule: totals count them by property, while page tables count them by page, so two of your results on one search are one impression in the total but two in the page table (how Search Console counts data). The page breakdown can therefore show as many impressions as the total, or more, even when some pages are missing; trust the clicks figure.

Read the results

• The cards show Total clicks (date level), Query data hidden, Page data hidden and the Sampling level, with a recommendation underneath.
• Visible vs hidden charts what each breakdown can and cannot show.
• Daily coverage shows the share of each day's clicks that the query and page breakdowns account for, with a table per day. Dips often mark days with unusual, rare searches.
• Sampling across all timeframes runs the same check for the last 7 days, 28 days, 3 months and 6 months, so you can see how the gap grows with the range.

What to do about it

• Keep query-level conclusions to shorter ranges, and segment by folder or country so each request stays under the row limits.
• For reporting totals, use the date-level numbers, which are always complete.
• When the query gap is severe, analyse by page instead: pages lose much less.
• If you need complete history beyond 16 months, turn on stored history for the property (connecting Search Console). It cannot recover anonymised queries, which Google never provides.

To compare every property in your account at once, open Sampling impact from the account menu.

How AutoPSEO helps

The content engine plans topics from the queries Search Console does show, so a high query gap means some demand is invisible to it as well. It also takes topics your site hands over, topics you add yourself and keywords you saved from research, none of which the gap affects (how topics are chosen).