Branded search in SEO reports: strip it out or keep it in?

Both sides are partly right, and which one wins depends on the decision the report feeds. If you're deciding where to spend content budget, strip brand out. Most brand demand comes from TV, word of mouth and paid, so rising brand clicks will make whatever SEO did last quarter look better than it was. If you're reporting to someone who only looks at sessions, keep branded traffic in, but show the split as its own line so nobody mixes the two up.

I'd stay away from brand share as a KPI, though. It moves when competitors spend, not when you change something on the site. Honestly, how do you all split it?

Brand share doesn't only move with competitor spend. If your branded SERP has wrong business info, a weak sitelink set, or a competitor ad sitting above you, fixing those changes how many people click through. So I'd still track it, just not as a success metric.

Iris is right that the branded SERP is fixable, and whether branded organic clicks belong in the SEO report mostly comes down to one thing: do you also bid on your own brand terms? If you do, a lot of those organic clicks come from people who would have clicked the ad anyway, so the organic number flatters the SEO work behind it. If you don't run brand campaigns, those clicks are mostly yours, and tracking brand share as a diagnostic makes more sense.

Agreed on the split, and the test that settles it is cheap. Pause brand ads for a couple of weeks, then compare total brand clicks and conversions (paid plus organic) against the weeks before. Organic will pick up some of the lost ad clicks, but rarely all of them, and the gap is the part of your brand ad spend that was actually doing work.

Search Console can't tell you this on its own. It doesn't show whether an ad sat above your listing for a given query, so the report keeps crediting SEO for clicks it may not have earned.

If the test shows a big gap, keep brand bidding and label the organic brand line as shared. If the gap is small, you can cut brand spend, and the organic number means what it appears to mean. Just watch seasonality, because a pause during a slow month will flatter the result.

Depends on whether competitors bid on your brand terms. If they do, pausing your ads doesn't just push those clicks to your organic listing. Some of them land on a rival's ad, so the drop in total brand clicks blends your ad's real value with what you lose to conquesting. Look at auction insights for your brand queries before you pause anything. If nobody else shows up there, Rowan's test reads cleanly.

It comes down to how often a rival's ad actually sits above your organic listing on your brand queries, not whether they bid at all. Auction insights gives you overlap rate and position-above rate, so look at those on the brand campaign first. If a rival rarely overlaps with you, pausing barely changes anything. If they're above you most of the time, the pause is mostly measuring their ad, so Rowan's test tells you very little about yours.

I'd disagree with the last line. If a rival sits above your organic listing most of the time, the pause still tells you something, it just measures something different. Your ad is mostly stopping them from taking the click, so the drop in total brand clicks is close to the value of defending that query. That's still a number you can use to decide whether brand bidding earns its cost, even if it's smaller than what you'd get on a query with no rival.

The other gap is that auction insights only covers auctions where your ads were running. It shows how often you overlap before the pause and says nothing about what happens during it. So use it to decide whether the test is worth running, but don't expect it to predict the result. In a slow month or right after a big competitor promo, the pause can look good or bad for reasons the auction data can't show.