Search Analyst tool reference
What each of the ten tools returns, and the method behind it.
Updated 8 November 2026
| Tool | What it returns | Ask it |
|---|---|---|
list_sites | Your Search Console properties and Bing sites | “Which sites can you see?” |
performance_summary | Clicks, impressions, CTR and position vs the previous period or last year, with top movers | “How did my site do this month?” |
traffic_drop_diagnosis | Splits a click change into ranking, demand, click-through and disappeared queries or pages; finds the day it started | “Why did my traffic drop?” |
decaying_pages | Pages with a sustained click decline over 6 to 26 weeks, with the likely reason | “Which pages are losing clicks?” |
striking_distance_keywords | Queries at positions 8 to 20, ranked by clicks you would likely gain at position 3 | “What keywords am I almost ranking for?” |
keyword_cannibalisation | Queries where several of your pages split impressions, with a suggested owner page | “Are my pages competing with each other?” |
inspect_url | Index status, coverage, last crawl, robots.txt, Google's chosen canonical vs yours | “Is this page indexed?” |
bing_query_stats | Top Bing queries with clicks, impressions, CTR and position vs the period before | “What do people search on Bing to find us?” |
bing_crawl_issues | 4xx, 5xx, DNS, time-out, robots.txt and malware issues Bing found | “What is Bing failing to crawl?” |
submit_indexnow | Notify Bing and other IndexNow engines of new or changed URLs on your verified site | “Ping Bing about these new pages.” |
Dates and data lag
Periods end on the latest complete day, three days before today, because Search Console data for the last 2 to 3 days is incomplete. Comparisons use the period just before, or the same dates 52 weeks earlier (364 days, so weekdays line up) to remove seasonality. Search Console keeps about 16 months, so year-on-year comparisons work for periods of up to about 120 days.
traffic_drop_diagnosis
For every query, the click change splits exactly into an impression effect (change in impressions × old CTR) and a CTR effect (new impressions × change in CTR). If the query's average position worsened by a place or more (or by 25%), both effects count as ranking loss. Otherwise the impression effect is a demand change (fewer searches at the same position: seasonality, trends) and the CTR effect a click-through change (same position, fewer clicks: AI answers, ads, rich results, weaker snippets). Queries and pages with no impressions in the new period count as stopped appearing. Totals come from date rows, which include anonymised queries, so the difference is shown as "not attributable" instead of disappearing. The tool also finds the day a sharp drop started (largest fall in the 7-day average, at least 20%) and flags a device or country that carries far more of the loss than its usual share.
decaying_pages
Weekly clicks per page over 6 to 26 weeks. A page is decaying when its clicks in the last third of the window are at least 20% (configurable) below the first third, the least-squares trend is negative, and at least 75% of the second-half weeks stay below the starting level, so a single bad week never qualifies. The reason compares position, impressions and CTR between the two thirds.
striking_distance_keywords
Queries with average position 8 to 20 (configurable) and at least 50 impressions. The expected CTR at position 3 comes from your site's own CTR by position, blended with typical industry values where your data is thin and forced to fall with position. Opportunity = impressions × expected CTR at position 3 − current clicks. Each row shows the page that ranks, and how many other pages of yours also appear.
keyword_cannibalisation
For each query with at least 100 impressions (over 90 days by default), pages that take at least 10% of its impressions compete. Queries with two or more are ranked by total impressions × (1 − the top page's share): how much visibility is spread away from your strongest page. URL fragments (#section links) are merged into their page. The suggestion names the page that should own the query.
inspect_url
Calls Google's URL Inspection API for one URL: verdict, coverage state, whether indexing is allowed (noindex meta tag or header), page fetch result, robots.txt, last crawl time and crawler, your declared canonical and the one Google chose, sitemaps and referring URLs, rich results. It adds plain fixes for the common problems. Google allows 2,000 inspections per site per day.
bing_query_stats and bing_crawl_issues
Use the Bing Webmaster API with your own key. Query stats sum Bing's weekly rows for the period and the one before, with impression-weighted position. Crawl issues decode Bing's issue flags (malware, 5xx, DNS, time-outs, important URLs blocked by robots.txt, 4xx, robots.txt blocks, redirects), count them, and list URLs most serious first, then by links pointing at them.
submit_indexnow
Submits up to 500 URLs on one host. Before sending, it checks that the host is a Search Console property where you are an owner or full user (or a verified site in your Bing account), and that your key file is reachable at https://host/<key>.txt with the right content. If not, it explains exactly what to upload. It is the only tool not marked read-only, so ChatGPT and Claude ask you first.
Quotas
Search Analyst keeps well inside Google's limits (1,200 Search Analytics queries a minute per site and per user): 1 to 9 API requests per tool call (decaying_pages makes one per week analysed, up to 26), at most 4 at a time, with identical requests answered from a 10-minute in-memory cache. Plan limits count successful tool calls on your own data and distinct sites per calendar month.