One of the more useful things you can do with Search Console is figure out exactly what questions people are typing before they end up on your site. Not just the keywords they’re searching, but the actual “how do I,” “what is,” “why does” phrasing, since that tells you what someone genuinely wants to know rather than just what topic they’re circling.
Google Search Console houses all of that information you just have to know how to pull it out. One of the easiest (and more efficient) ways is to use regex to filter the index. To do this go to Search Results under Performance. Click add filter and choose Query. Then choose Custom (regex).
Here’s the pattern to paste, in case it’s useful to anyone :
^(who|what|when|where|why|how|which|whose|whom|is|are|was|were|do|does|did|can|could|will|would|should|has|have|had)\sIt matches any query that starts with one of those question words followed by a space, which covers most of the natural ways people phrase a search when they’re asking a question rather than just typing a product name or a brand term.
Why this matters if you run a business
A search like “what does widget a cost” could mean a dozen different things depending on who’s typing it, but “how much does a blue widget cost in St. Louis” tells you almost exactly what that person wants to know and how to answer it. Filtering down to question queries is a way of hearing your customers ask their actual questions, in their own words, before they’ve ever talked to anyone at your company.
Once you have that list, you can check it against what’s already on your site. Some of those questions you’re probably answering well, and you’ll see it in the clicks and impressions already showing up for them. Others you might not be answering anywhere at all, which is usually the more interesting half of the list, since it points straight at what to write next. And some pages might already be ranking for a question but sitting further down the results than they should, which is a specific, fixable problem rather than just a general sense that a page “could probably do better.”
None of this is a new idea. People have been mining query data for content gaps for years. It’s just a little more useful lately, since so much of what shows up when someone asks a question now runs through an AI answer first, and plain, direct answers to real questions are what those systems tend to pull from.