Amazon has never given sellers a Search Console. Search Query Performance (SQP) is the closest substitute, and it is the only free Amazon report that ties a specific customer query to what happened next — impression, click, cart add, purchase — with your share of each stage alongside the marketplace total.
That last part is what makes it useful. Every other report tells you how you did. SQP tells you how you did relative to everyone else competing for the same query, which is the only version of the number that can tell you whether to change your listing, change your bid, or leave it alone.
What SQP actually shows
SQP lives in Seller Central under Brand Analytics, so it requires Brand Registry. You can view it two ways, and the difference matters more than most sellers realise:
- Brand view — every query where any ASIN in your brand appeared. Use it to find demand you are not covering at all.
- ASIN view — the queries a single ASIN appeared on. Use it to diagnose one listing, especially after a change.
Each row is a customer search query, not a keyword you chose. These are the phrases shoppers actually typed, which is why SQP so often exposes the gap between the keyword set in your backend fields and how people describe your product in the wild.
Read it as a funnel, not a table. Every metric in SQP belongs to one of four stages, and the stage where your share drops is the stage that tells you what to fix. A number in isolation means nothing.
The four funnel stages
For each query, Amazon reports totals for the whole marketplace and your slice of them at four points:
Amazon also gives you median click and purchase price on the query, plus same-day, 1-day and 2-day delivery counts on purchases. The delivery split is quietly one of the most useful columns in the report: if your purchase share is weak on a query where most purchases ship same-day, you have a fulfilment problem, not a copy problem.
Why share beats volume
A query with 400,000 impressions where you hold 0.3% of clicks is a worse use of your attention than a query with 9,000 impressions where you hold 14% of clicks and 2% of purchases. The first is a fight you are losing at scale. The second is a fight you are winning and could win harder.
The single most valuable derived number in SQP is the ratio between your stages. Take your click share and divide it by your impression share. Above 1 means your listing punches above its ranking — shoppers pick you when they see you. Below 1 means Amazon is showing you and shoppers are walking past.
A ratio like that is a direct instruction: the creative is working, so the constraint is exposure. That is a PPC budget decision, not a copywriting project. Flip the numbers — 6% impression share and 3% click share — and spending more on ads just buys you more chances to be ignored.
Diagnosing three failure patterns
Almost everything SQP surfaces falls into one of three shapes.
1Impressions but no clicks
You are indexed and ranking, and shoppers are skipping you. The cause is nearly always in the search result tile: main image, price relative to the median click price on that query, review count, or a title that buries the thing the query asked for. Compare your median click price to the query median — if you are 30% above the market on a price-led query, no image fix will save it.
2Clicks but no cart adds
The tile sold the click and the detail page lost the shopper. Look at the gallery order, whether the first three bullets answer the query intent, and whether your A+ content loads above the fold on mobile. This is the pattern where listing work pays back fastest.
3Cart adds but no purchases
Something breaks at checkout economics: Buy Box share, shipping speed, a coupon that expired, or a variation family where the cheaper child steals the order. Check Buy Box percentage on the ASIN for the same period before you touch the copy.
Feeding SQP into PPC
SQP is organic and paid combined, which makes it a better prioritisation layer for advertising than the search term report on its own. Three moves that consistently pay:
- Fund the high-conversion, low-impression queries. Queries where your purchase share is well above your impression share are queries Amazon has not yet decided you own. Paid placement is how you tell it.
- Stop funding queries you convert badly on. If your cart-add share is a fraction of your click share on a query and it has been that way for two months, that query is a mismatch, not an opportunity. Negative it and move the budget.
- Watch the queries you newly appear on. After a listing change or a launch, new rows in SQP show which terms Amazon has started associating with you. That is the earliest signal that a relevance change actually landed.
If you are still cutting wasted spend by hand, our guide to lowering ACoS covers the negative-keyword workflow that pairs with this.
A monthly working cadence
SQP rewards discipline more than cleverness. The cadence that works for the accounts we manage:
| When | What you do | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Pull the monthly brand view. Sort by purchase share ascending on your top 50 queries by volume. | A shortlist of losing queries |
| Week 1 | Tag each shortlisted query as an impression, click, cart-add or purchase problem. | One cause per query |
| Week 2 | Fix the cluster with the most shared root cause — usually one image or one title pattern across several ASINs. | One shipped change |
| Week 3 | Move PPC budget toward queries with a click-to-impression ratio above 1.2. | Reallocated spend |
| Week 4 | Pull the ASIN view for anything you changed and note the baseline before the change. | A measurable before/after |
One change at a time per ASIN. SQP is weekly data on a marketplace with weekly seasonality. If you change the main image, the title and the price in the same week, you will not be able to attribute the result to any of them — and you will repeat the wrong one.
The sellers who get value from this report are not the ones who read it most often. They are the ones who let it choose what they work on next.
Frequently asked questions
Who can access the Search Query Performance report?
It sits inside Brand Analytics in Seller Central, so you need an active Brand Registry enrolment for the brand you want to analyse. Sellers without Brand Registry see no SQP data at all, which is one of the more practical arguments for enrolling.
How often is Search Query Performance updated?
Amazon publishes it on weekly, monthly and quarterly views. Weekly data is the most actionable for launches and promotions; monthly is the better lens for judging whether a listing change worked, because it smooths out single-week noise.
Is Search Query Performance the same as Search Terms report?
No. The Brand Analytics Top Search Terms report ranks queries across the whole marketplace and shows which ASINs get clicked. Search Query Performance is your data: the queries where your ASINs appeared, and your share of impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases on each one.
Want this run on your account every month?
Our Amazon store management includes a monthly SQP review, with the listing and PPC changes actioned — not just reported.
See what management includes →