November 05, 2025
|10 mins
The new Search Console Insights feature isn’t just a cleanup. It’s an AI-powered signal for B2B market trends, and here’s how to use it.
The official example is very B2C focused. Google explains that queries like “how to make guacamole dip” and “guac dip recipe easy” will now be grouped into one “topic.” Their stated goal is to make the “long, cluttered list” of queries less tedious to analyze.
For B2C, high-volume blogs, this is a nice quality-of-life update.
For B2B tech marketers, “less tedious” is the understatement of the year. This isn’t a cleanup; it’s a crystal ball.
We’re in the business of high-consideration, low-volume, high-intent keywords. Our problem has never been too much volume; it’s been stitching together the fragmented, long-tail queries to figure out what a buyer actually wants.
Until now, we had to do that manually. This update lets Google’s AI do it for us.
It’s a fundamental shift from keyword reporting to intent analysis.
But before we get into the B2B strategy, let’s quickly cover the mechanics.
According to Google’s announcement, the new “Queries leading to your site” card in Search Console Insights will now:
Group Similar Queries: It uses AI to bundle query variations (misspellings, different phrasings) that reflect a similar user intent into a single “group.” Note: Groups are computed dynamically and may evolve, with no impact on search rankings.
Show Group Performance: Instead of just seeing clicks for individual terms, you’ll see the total clicks for the entire group, giving you a much better high-level perspective.
Provide a Drill-Down: This is key. You can click any group to be “directed to the performance report to see all the individual, granular queries that make up that group.”
Spotlight Trends: The card will automatically show you which groups are “Top” by volume, “Trending up” (largest click increase), and “Trending down” (largest click decrease). This feature is rolling out gradually over the coming weeks and is available only for sites with a high volume of queries.
Now that we’ve covered the basics, here’s what those features actually mean for a B2B marketer.
What Google Says: “Query groups solve this problem by grouping similar queries… they reflect a similar user intent.”
For years, the most contentious debate in B2B content strategy meetings has been around structure. “Is this one big pillar page, or five separate blog posts?”
We’ve all been there. Your SME (Subject Matter Expert) insists that “kubernetes cost monitoring” and “finops for EKS best practices” are totally different topics. Your SEO manager, armed with a keyword tool, argues they’re semantically related and should be on the same page to build authority.
The result?
A compromise that satisfies no one: either a bloated, unfocused “monster” article or five thin, niche posts that compete against each other for the same SERP (a classic case of keyword cannibalization).
This update ends that debate. Google is now your objective, AI-powered moderator.
By grouping “kubernetes cost monitoring”, “finops for EKS best practices”, and “how to reduce GKE egress fees” into a single query group, Google isn’t just “tidying up” your report. It is making a definitive statement about user intent.
It’s telling you: “The same person (your potential buyer) searches for all these things as part of the same problem-solving journey.”
This feature hands you your content clusters on a silver platter.
The Old Way (Pre-Query Groups): You log into GSC and see this:
Your Action: You assign four different, 1,200-word blog posts to your content team. Your engineering resources are stretched thin writing them, and your authority on the overall topic is diluted across four separate URLs.
The New Way (With Query Groups): You log into GSC Insights and see one card:
Your Action: You greenlight one authoritative, 3,500-word pillar page titled “The Ultimate Guide to Kubernetes Cost Management & FinOps.” Then, you click the “drill-down” feature and hand the list of granular queries to your writer. Those queries become your H2s, H3s, and FAQ schema:
This isn’t just more efficient; it’s more effective.
You’re creating the exact comprehensive resource Google’s AI has already identified as matching the full spectrum of a user’s intent.
You’re no longer guessing at semantic relationships; you’re using Google’s own map. This is gold for mapping content directly to your buyer’s journey, from early “what is” questions to later “how-to” problem-solving.
What Google Says: “You can click any group and be directed to the performance report to see all the individual, granular queries that make up that group.”
When B2B marketers first saw the “Query Groups” announcement, we all felt a jolt of “not provided” panic. The fear that Google was abstracting away our most valuable, high-intent, long-tail data was very real.
This single sentence—”you can click any group… to see all the individual, granular queries”—is the most important part of the entire announcement. The data isn’t gone. It’s not even hidden. It’s just been given a “boss.”
This update isn’t about less data; it’s about better-organized data. It gives us the best of both worlds: a high-level “executive summary” for our strategy and the “in-the-weeds” specifics for our execution.
For B2B marketers, this structure is perfect. It solves a massive internal reporting problem: how to communicate performance to different stakeholders without overwhelming them.
Your CMO doesn’t have time to parse a 10,000-row CSV of query variations. They need the “so what.” The “Group” view is the “so what.”
Your Report: “This quarter, our ‘Data Observability Platforms’ topic (a new Query Group) drove 40% of all new demo requests from organic. It’s our top-performing group. Meanwhile, our legacy ‘ETL Monitoring’ group is ‘Trending down,’ suggesting a market shift that we’re successfully capturing.”
The Value: This is a clean, strategic narrative. You’re speaking in terms of market categories and topic performance, not just keywords. It directly ties content performance to the high-level business strategy.
For Your Content & Product Teams (The “Drill-Down” View)
This is where you, the marketer, find the real gold. You click that “Data Observability Platforms” group, and you get the raw, unfiltered voice of your customer.
Your Report: “I drilled down into the ‘Data Observability’ group. The highest-click queries aren’t just generic. I’m seeing:
The Value (for Content): This is your next three-month editorial calendar. You now have proof that your audience is struggling with data transformation, cloud data warehouses, and data orchestration. You can write hyper-specific, problem-solving articles that you know have an audience, rather than guessing.
The Value (for Product Marketing): This is a direct feed to your Product team. You can go to them and say, “The market is explicitly searching for ‘cloud data warehouse quality alerts.’ Our integration with cloud data warehouses is a key sales-enablement asset. We need a one-pager, a new landing page, and a webinar on this exact use case. The data proves it.”
This two-tiered system allows you to manage up with strategic insights (the Group) and manage down with tactical, actionable data (the Drill-Down). It’s not an abstraction; it’s a built-in reporting framework that perfectly separates the “what” from the “why.”
What Google Says: The card groups queries by “Top,” “Trending up,” and “Trending down.”
This is it. This is the feature that matters more than anything else. The “Top” groups are a vanity metric; the “Trending” groups are a compass.
This one feature single-handedly transforms Search Console Insights from a historical report into a forward-looking, strategic dashboard. For B2B, where identifying a market shift six months before your competitors can mean capturing an entire new category, this is the whole game.
This card is no longer an “SEO report” you send to your content team. It’s a “Market Intelligence Brief” you send to your heads of Product, Sales, and Demand Gen.
Here’s how to use it.
When a B2C marketer sees a topic “trending up,” they think, “Great, a new blog post.” When a B2B tech marketer sees a new query group “trending up,” it’s an emergency flare. It’s a direct, unfiltered signal from the market that a new, urgent, and previously unarticulated problem is forming.
This isn’t just an “SEO opportunity.” It’s a revenue opportunity.
Example: A B2B SaaS company for DevOps teams sees a new group called “AI-assisted code review” suddenly start “Trending up.”
The Old (Reactive) Action: The SEO manager assigns a blog post: “What is AI-Assisted Code Review?” It gets 500 clicks.
The New (Proactive) B2B Action: This is an all-hands-on-deck signal that informs your entire go-to-market motion:
Product Marketing: You have a new, validated pain point. Is your product already solving this? If yes, you immediately spin up a new landing page, a one-pager, and a competitor comparison matrix. If no, you take this data directly to the product team as evidence for a new feature on the roadmap.
Sales Enablement: Your sales team is likely hearing objections about this on calls right now. You use the “drill-down” feature to see the granular queries (“github copilot vs. custom code review”, “security risks of AI code review”). You immediately create a sales battlecard titled “Handling AI Code Review Objections” and a one-page PDF: “How Our Platform Complements (or Replaces) AI Review Tools.”
Demand Gen: You have a new, high-intent topic before it’s saturated and expensive. You immediately launch a “test” paid search campaign against this query group and make it the theme of your next webinar. You are capturing demand while your competitors are still debating the blog title.
Just as valuable as knowing what’s next is knowing what’s over. In B2B tech, we waste millions of dollars in ad spend and content resources propping up “solved problems.” This feature is your permission to stop.
When a “Top” group—especially one that has been a cash cow for you—starts “Trending down” for two or three consecutive periods, it’s not a blip. It’s a “sunset” signal. The market is moving on. The problem is either solved, or the terminology has changed.
Example: A cloud data platform sees its core money-making group, “legacy data warehouse migration”, on a steady “Trending down” decline for six months.
The Old (Panicked) Action: “SEO is down! Double the ad budget on these keywords! Refresh all the old migration blogs!”
The New (Strategic) B2B Action: You accept the data. The market isn’t searching for “migration” anymore; they’ve migrated. Their new problems are different.
Ad Budget: You immediately pull your expensive, low-performing ad budget from the “legacy migration” campaign. You re-allocate that entire budget to the new “Trending up” group (e.g., “multi-cloud data governance”) where you can be the dominant, first-mover voice.
Content Strategy: You stop “refreshing” your 101-level migration content. Instead, you treat it as a “solved problem” and pivot. You create a new content cluster called “Post-Migration Optimization” and use your old “migration” posts to link up to this new, more advanced content, capturing the user in their next logical step.
Customer Marketing: You alert your Customer Success team. This is a sign that even your existing customers are past their initial problem. It’s time to build retention and upsell campaigns focused on new problems, like “cost optimization” and “data quality,” not the problem you already solved for them.
The rest of the marketing world will treat Google’s new “Query Groups” as a tactical SEO update. They will mourn the “loss” of granular, day-to-day query data and see it as just another “not provided” headache.
Let them.
For B2B tech marketers, this update is a strategic gift. While the official announcement is general, its implications for B2B are profound: It’s Google’s explicit permission to stop obsessing over the tactical noise of 10,000 long-tail keyword variations and start focusing on the strategic signal of the market.
This new dashboard isn’t for your SEO intern to find a few keyword gaps. This is for your leadership team.
Google just handed you, on a single screen:
This isn’t an “SEO tool” anymore. It’s a product marketing, sales enablement, and go-to-market compass.
While your competitors are busy trying to reverse-engineer the groups to get their old, messy CSVs back, you should be having entirely different conversations.
You should be taking the “Trending up” card to your product team, the “Trending down” card to your paid media manager, and the “Drill-Down” query lists to your sales enablement leads.
Google just told you what your market wants. Your only job is to act on it—starting today.
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