Branded vs non-branded keywords: what they are and why to separate them

The split is about intent as much as wording.

Branded searches convert at high rates and rank easily, so they inflate averages for click-through rate and position. They also move with things SEO does not control: launches, PR, events, and paid campaigns. Non-branded searches are where SEO competes for buyers who do not know you yet. Reporting the two separately shows whether organic growth is coming from new demand or from people who would have found you anyway.

In the Performance report, add a Query filter, choose Custom (regex), and enter a pattern that matches your brand and its variants, for example serion ?flow|serionflo. Select 'Matches regex' for branded and 'Doesn't match regex' for non-branded. Search Console uses RE2 syntax and the filter is case-insensitive by default. Save the two views or export both monthly. Remember that Search Console withholds some rare queries for privacy, so query-level totals are smaller than page-level totals.

AI assistants change how branded demand appears. A buyer may ask ChatGPT for the best tool for a job, see your brand named, and then search your brand on Google. That shows up as branded search growth even though the discovery happened in an AI answer. Rising branded impressions alongside flat non-branded impressions can therefore be a sign of AI visibility, which is worth checking with a fixed prompt set rather than assuming.

That is a paid search question, and the answer depends on whether competitors bid on your name and how much incremental traffic the ads add. Run a holdout test before deciding. For organic search, make sure your branded results are healthy: your own pages rank for brand plus pricing, login, alternatives, and reviews, and third-party comparison pages describe you accurately. Our free SEO competitor analysis can show which competitors appear for your branded comparisons. SerionFlow is the wrong tool for branded paid search decisions; it uses Search Console data to plan organic pages and does not manage ads.