Brand Query
Also known as: Branded search, Navigational query
A search for the property or organization by name. The least gameable evidence that attention was held rather than borrowed.
A brand query is a search containing the property's name or an unambiguous reference to it. Volume and trend on brand queries is the cleanest available evidence that a property is being returned to deliberately rather than found accidentally.
It is also one of the few signals that is difficult to manufacture. Links can be bought and content can be generated, but people searching for your name by choice is an outcome rather than an input.
Brand query volume is slow, and on a new property it is zero for a long time. It is a lagging indicator by design, which makes it useless for week-to-week decisions and valuable for answering whether the last two years accumulated anything.