Hide people's names in search tables

People often search for someone by name: your managing director, a staff member, an author or a spokesperson. Those searches land in your report’s search tables next to your real service searches. Turn this option on and list the names, and the report swaps those rows for one line with the totals, so the names never appear.

It’s on every plan and set per brand. It’s off by default.

What changes in the report

Any search containing a name on your list comes out of these tables:

• Top queries in the Search & Site section
• Where the demand is in the Demand section (Strategic)
• Searches that found your profile in the Google Business Profile section

The searches it takes out are added together into one line at the bottom of each table:

Search	Clicks	Impressions	CTR	Position
Searches for people (4 searches, names hidden)	38	912	4.17%	3.2

• Clicks and impressions are the totals of the searches taken out.
• CTR is worked out from those totals.
• Position is the average position, weighted by impressions.

The tables still show your top searches, filled from the searches that don’t name anyone. The section totals (clicks, impressions, CTR and position for the whole site) don’t change.

The write-ups never see the names either. The learnings, actions and analysis are written from the tables after the names come out.

Turn it on

Owners and admins can change this.

1. Go to Marketing Feed > your brand > Setup tab > Report options.
2. Under Hide people’s names in search tables, select On.
3. Type the names in the box, one per line.
4. Select Save.

The change shows from the next report or re-run. To see it straight away, re-run the month. Reports that have already been generated don’t change.

To stop hiding names, select Off. Your list is kept, so you can switch it back on later without typing it again.

How names are matched

A search is taken out when it contains a name on your list as whole words.

• Capitalisation doesn’t matter. “Jane Smith” matches “jane smith”.
• Whole words only. “Lewis” matches “lewis engineering” but not “lewisham”.
• Punctuation is ignored. “Jane Smith” matches “jane smith’s email”.
• Word order matters. “Jane Smith” doesn’t match “smith jane”. List both if people search both ways.
• Accents are ignored. “Zoe” matches “zoë”.

You decide how wide the net is:

You list	It hides	It leaves
Jane Smith	“jane smith ceo”, “jane smith linkedin”	“smith engineering”, “jane street”
Smith	Every search with the word “smith”	“smithfield”

Watch for names that are also normal words

Listing a single word hides every search that contains it. If a surname is also your company name, a place or a normal word (for example “Hill”, “Brook” or “Sydney”), list the full name instead so your real searches stay in the table.

Good to know

• It only hides what Google sends. Search Console already leaves out rare searches for privacy, and the report stores your top 200 searches a month. The “Searches for people” line covers the matching searches among those.
• Your own tracked keywords aren’t touched. The Keywords table shows the keywords you chose, so it’s left as it is.
• Google Ads keywords aren’t touched. They’re the keywords you bid on, not what people searched.