How to Fix Not Provided in Google Analytics

Seeing "(not provided)" fill up your Google Analytics keyword report can feel like trying to navigate with a map where all the important street names are blacked out. You know people are finding your website through search, but the specific terms they used are hidden. This article breaks down exactly why that keyword data is missing and gives you practical, step-by-step methods to uncover the insights you need to grow your organic traffic.

Why Does Google Analytics Show "(Not Provided)"?

First, it's important to understand that "(not provided)" isn't a bug or an error in your Google Analytics setup. It’s an intentional feature that Google rolled out back in 2011 to protect user privacy. When someone is logged into a Google account (like Gmail or YouTube) and performs a search, their search session is encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). This security measure prevents the search query - the exact keyword they typed - from being passed along in the referral data to the website they click on.

Before this change, every keyword that led a user to your site was clearly visible in your reports. But in the name of privacy, Google decided to withhold this information. While great for users, it created a massive blind spot for marketers, SEO professionals, and business owners who rely on keyword data to understand customer intent, optimize content, and measure the effectiveness of their SEO efforts. The volume of "(not provided)" traffic started small but quickly grew to encompass over 90% of organic search keywords for most websites.

So, when you see "(not provided)," you are looking at all the organic search traffic from users who performed their search over a secure (HTTPS) connection. It’s a reality of modern analytics, but it doesn't mean you have to give up on understanding your search performance.

Can You Really Fix "(Not Provided)"?

Let's get one thing straight: there is no magic button to decrypt or "fix" the "(not provided)" data within Google Analytics itself. That information is permanently hidden from Analytics, and there's no way to retroactively recover it. Anyone promising a simple script or tool that can unlock this data is likely misinformed.

However, you can absolutely work around it. The goal isn't to unlock the keyword data inside Google Analytics, but to use other tools and techniques to piece together the very same insights. By using other free Google platforms and shifting your analytical approach slightly, you can get a remarkably clear picture of which keywords are driving valuable traffic and conversions. The rest of this guide focuses on these powerful, practical workarounds.

Solution 1: Your Best Friend is Google Search Console

If there's one tool that can fill the gap left by "(not provided)," it's Google Search Console (GSC). It's a free service from Google that helps you monitor your site's presence in Google Search results. Unlike Google Analytics, which focuses on what users do on your site, GSC focuses on what happens before they click - including the keywords they use to find you.

Connecting GSC to your Google Analytics 4 property is the single most important step you can take to reclaim your keyword data. It's essentially telling Google, "Please show me my search performance data within my Analytics interface."

How to Link Google Search Console to GA4

1. Navigate to your Google Analytics 4 property.
2. In the bottom-left corner, click on Admin.
3. Under the Property column, scroll down to Product Links and click on Search Console Links.
4. Click the blue Link button. A new screen will appear, prompting you to 'Choose a Search Console property'.
5. Select the appropriate Search Console property for your website and click Confirm. Follow the prompts to select your web data stream and finalize the link.

It can take 24-48 hours for the data to fully populate. Once it's linked, you’ll unlock two new reports in your GA4 library.

You can find them by going to Reports > Acquisition. You may need to add them to your reporting library if they aren't visible. Inside, you'll see a new section called "Google Search Console" with two reports:

• Queries: This report shows the exact search terms people used to find your site on Google, along with clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average search position. This is the "(not provided)" data you've been missing!
• Google Organic Search Traffic: This is a landing page report with added Search Console metrics.

This report directly solves the core problem of "(not provided)" keywords. While it separates the data - Analytics tracks what happens post-click and Search Console tracks what happens pre-click - it gives you the critical missing piece of the puzzle.

Solution 2: Connect the Dots with Your Landing Pages

While the Queries report in Search Console shows you your keywords, it doesn’t directly connect them to user behavior like engagement rate or conversions. But you can bridge this gap by looking at your landing pages.

The logic is simple: while you might not know the exact keyword a user typed to reach a page, you know the page they landed on. Powerful landing pages are typically hyper-focused on a specific topic or primary keyword. By analyzing the performance of a landing page, you can infer the intent of the keywords that brought users there.

Here's how to connect the data:

1. In Google Analytics 4, go to Reports > Engagement > Landing pages.
2. Set your date range and apply a filter to only show organic search traffic. You do this by clicking 'Add filter' at the top, building a condition where Session primary channel group exactly matches Organic Search, and clicking 'Apply'.
3. This report now shows you your top-performing pages from organic search, along with engagement, conversions, and revenue. You might see, for example, that your blog post on "how to build a workout plan" is driving a ton of conversions.
4. Now, pivot back to Google Search Console (or the integrated GSC report in GA4).
5. In the Performance report, click the + New filter button and select page. Enter the URL of the high-performing landing page you identified in Google Analytics.

This filtered view will now show you all the queries that led users specifically to that one page. You’ll likely see dozens of variations you hadn't even thought of, like "beginner workout schedule," "best gym routine," or "create a weekly fitness plan."

By combining these two reports, you can answer the crucial question: "What collection of keywords is driving valuable traffic to the page that solves X problem?" It’s a powerful way to understand user intent on a page-by-page level.

Solution 3: Leverage Google Ads for Keyword Insights

This technique is for those who run Google Ads alongside their SEO efforts. By linking your Google Ads account with your Search Console account, you can access the Paid & Organic Report within Google Ads. This report compares how your site performs in paid ads and organic search results for the same user queries.

When you view data for "Organic" in this report, it shows you the search terms that triggered your organic listings to appear on the results page alongside one of your ads. Crucially, this provides a glimpse into keyword data that isn’t filtered as "(not provided)." You get impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position for the keywords in your organic results.

Why This Works

Google has an incentive to provide keyword-level data to paying advertisers to help them optimize their campaigns. Because of this, some of the privacy restrictions seem to be relaxed in this combined report.

Limitations

• Requires a Google Ads budget: This won't work if you aren’t running any paid search campaigns.
• Incomplete data: It only reveals keywords for queries where you had both a paid and an organic result show up. It won't give you data for keywords you don't bid on.

Despite the limitations, this report can uncover valuable keywords, especially for commercial-intent terms where you might be competing in both paid and organic arenas.

Other Clever Ways to Uncover Keyword Intent

Besides the primary methods above, you can round out your understanding with a few other creative tactics.

Check Your Internal Site Search

What do people search for once they're already on your site? Their queries are a goldmine of intent! It’s unfiltered, direct voice-of-the-customer data telling you what they're looking for in their own words.

In GA4, internal site search tracking is automatically enabled as part of Enhanced Measurement. You can find this data by going to Reports > Engagement > Events and clicking on the view_search_results event. The search_term parameter will show you everything people have typed into your search bar.

Utilize SEO & Competitor Analysis Tools

While not a direct "fix," third-party SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz can fill in many of the gaps. These platforms crawl the web and maintain massive databases of keywords. You can enter your domain and see a highly accurate estimate of all the keywords you rank for, a log of your ranking position for each, and the estimated traffic they drive.

It’s not your actual user data from GA, but it's an incredibly effective way to see the big picture of your organic search footprint and guide your content strategy.

Final Thoughts

Losing direct keyword data to "(not provided)" was a challenging shift for many in the online world, but it doesn't leave you flying blind. "Not provided" is a permanent privacy feature, not a temporary problem, and the solution is to adapt by using the other excellent, and free, tools at your disposal like Google Search Console.

Manually switching between Google Analytics, Search Console, and Google Ads to piece this story together can get repetitive, taking hours each week just to wrangle data instead of acting on it. At Graphed, we eliminate this friction by connecting to all your data sources so you can get a unified view. Instead of cross-referencing CSV files, you can simply ask, "create a dashboard showing my top landing pages from GA4 and the top GSC queries driving traffic to them," and see it all instantly, in one place. If you're ready to get better insights from your marketing data in seconds, not hours, come check out Graphed.